Chipmaker Nvidia Seeks More Business With Detroit
A California graphics chip company with a long and storied history in advanced, high-resolution computer gaming is breaking into the automotive display industry.
Trouble is, Nvidia is doing business only with European automakers these days. It's still trying to break into the Detroit Three.
That was part of the reason for a luncheon Tuesday for Detroit tech and automotive reporters at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Nvidia showed off its technological prowess at the event -- from its Quadro chips that have a 90 percent lock on the graphic design market to its Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 processors that rendered beautiful, apparently infinitely changeable instrument panel graphics on several mockups of a car's interior.
Philip D. Hughes, director of automotive sales and business development, and Dave Anderson, automotive applications manager, said Nvidia has long had the motto "from superphones to supercomputers." Now, it's stretching that motto into "supercars" as well, they said.
Nvidia, founded in 1993, is now No. 1 in PC and professional graphics chips and has 6,800 employees worldwide. Its GPUs -- Graphics Processing Units -- are dense packs of more than three billion transistors on chips smaller than a dime. Its Tegra chips are used in mobile computing, its GeForce and Quadro chips in visual computing and computer-aided design, and its Tesla chips in supercomputers.
Its chips have amazing applications, from Hollywood special effects to super-sharp ultrasound machines -- even robot-assisted surgery, in which Nvidia chips help a surgical robot adjust for the motion of a beating heart, allowing precise surgery on the moving flesh.
All from chips designed to play video games.
Now, Nvidia seeks to break into Detroit from auto display applications for marques like Audi and Volkswagen. One Nvidia-equipped Audi is the world's first car to integrate Google Earth.
Nvidia is also studying how the GPU can move into active safety, such as collision avoidance, pedestrian detection and speed limit detection.
Nvidia currently has nine employees in the Detroit area and is hiring locally -- specifically in software development, user interface and integration.
More at www.nvidia.com.
Nvidia also announced integrations with high-end automakers Tesla and BMW at last January's Consumer Electronics Show.
