In a recent Leaderboard report, Navigant Research ranks NVIDIA as the leading automated driving compute platform. Navigant ranks companies in this report on 10 criteria: vision; go-to market strategy; partners; production strategy; technology; sales, marketing, and distribution; product capability; product quality and reliability; product portfolio; and staying power.

Automated Vehicle Compute Platforms Leaderboard. Navigant Leaderboard.

Development of automated driving (AD) technologies continues at a brisk pace in 2020 with more than 70 companies including legacy automakers, suppliers, startups, and technology companies new to the auto industry involved. AD requires the development of three key enabling technologies: sensors, software, and robust, yet power-efficient compute platforms.

Most early development was conducted by installing data center servers in vehicles—not a practical commercial solution.

Many of the development servers have used various combinations of Intel central processing units (CPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Mobileye application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), Xilinx FPGAs, and NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). However, the past several years have seen the development of more highly optimized compute platforms specifically targeted at power efficiency and improved neural network processing performance.

With the high-performance, energy-efficient DRIVE AGX platform, NVIDIA topped the inaugural leaderboard report for its progress in the space. The platform’s scalable architecture and the open, modular NVIDIA DRIVE software make it easy for autonomous vehicle manufacturers to scale DRIVE solutions to meet their individual production plans.

Navigant’s top-10 ranking for AD compute platforms:

1. NVIDIA
2. Intel-Mobileye
3. Qualcomm Technologies
4. Xilinx
5. Waymo LLC
6. Tesla
7. NXP Semiconductors
8. Renesas Electronics Corporation
9. Apple Inc.
10. AImotive