Comment on Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?
FortuneMisteller@lemmy.world 1 month agoA serious self driving vehicle must be able to see around with different sensors. But then it must have a lot of computing power on board to merge different streams of data coming from different sensor. I don’t know about the latest model, but I knew that the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers with several CUDA cards. That’s not something you cam put in a commercial car sold to the public, what you get is a car that relies only on one camera to look around and has a sensor in the bumper that cuts the engine if activated, but does not create an additional stream of data. Few sensors and little processing power, that is not enough, it is not a self driving car.
When Tesla sells a car with driving assistance they tell to the customer that their car is not a self driving car, but they fail to explain why, where is the difference. How big is the gap. That’s one of the reasons why we had so many accidents.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 1 month ago
But those were prototypes. These days you can get an NVIDIA H100 - several inches long, a few inches wide, one inch thick. It has 80GB of memory running at 3.5TB/s and 26 teraflops of compute (for comparison, Tesla autopilot runs on a 2 teraflop GPU).
The H100 is designed to be run in clusters, with eight GPUs on a single server, but I don’t think you’d do that with a self driving truck. You’d have two or maybe three servers, with one GPU each, and they’d be doing the same workload (for redundancy).
FortuneMisteller@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A real self driving software must do a lot of things in parallel. Computer vision is just one of the many tasks it has to do. I don’t think that a single H100 will be enough. The fact that the current self driving vehicles did not use so many processing power doesn’t mean a lot, they are prototypes running in controlled environments or under strict supervision.