As technology and the Internet of Things advance, our cars are turning into rolling entertainment centers. All of that fun and distraction, of course, means safety is becoming a huge priority for the industry.
Though it seems somewhat counterintuitive, one way to address the safety issue is to make sure the processors driving the infotainment systems are extremely powerful. After all, if they trouble handling all the applications quickly and flawlessly, that introduces even more distractions to the driver.
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) believes it's helping in this regard through the sheer power of its new Tegra K1 chip. The new chip mark the first time NVIDIA has brought the Kepler GP architecture to mobile applications. With a 192-core GPU, it's same architecture that runs supercomputers, powerful workstations, and PCs.
NVIDIA introduced the Tegra K1 at the 2014 International CES earlier this year. Motley Fool analyst Rex Moore was in Las Vegas for CES, and spoke with NVIDIA's Danny Shapiro about the chip and what it will mean for drivers.
In the video segment below, Shapiro explains that the chip's responsiveness makes the infotainment center safer, allowing the driver to glance at the screen once rather than fumbling for links and experiencing delays, while voice control with natural language processing adds another layer of safety and control.
A full transcript follows the video.
Danny Shapiro, NVIDIA: There are a number of things that we're doing to make driving safer and more enjoyable. The fact that the infotainment system is so responsive means that when you select something, or when you zoom in or zoom out, it's quick. You can glance at it, and you're not going to be distracted.
The problem a lot of other systems have is if you try to touch something and it doesn't respond right away, then you may touch it again. Then the system could catch up, and now you've registered two touches, and now you're on a screen that you didn't need to be on. That can become very frustrating.
Another thing is voice. There's great voice processing in this car, with natural language processing so that I can say something like, "I'm hungry for sushi," and what will come up on the screen here is a list of Japanese restaurants.
