American Consequences - September 2017

Photo Credit: Dave Lashmet

It’s also 1,000 times cheaper to put in a $1,000 graphics card for a self-thinking car, rather than a million-dollar computer system with its massive database of pictures the car has to match. That’s how graphics cards pulling away from conventional computers pays off. Auto manufacturers built 90 million new cars and trucks worldwide in 2015, according to industry group International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. So at $1,000 for an in-car graphics card, each 1% market share is worth $900 million to Nvidia. Machines are learning to think for themselves. This has never happened before. And the world might be forever changed. The upside is that early investors will profit the most... Plus, at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, we watched as Nvidia unveiled its next generation of chips... a technology called

Volta. Using the newest Nvidia chips, an Audi at the CES learned to drive around a maze – a closed course – in just four days. This new electronics board wasn’t a one- off, either. Nvidia is sampling it to select customers now, and German car-parts manufacturer Bosch is preparing to buy tens of thousands of Volta chips. That’s because carmaker Audi is going to put the prototype we just saw at the CES in full production for their 2020 model. Given the strange calendar for cars, that means we’ll automotive production line, you know that every component has to be finished and tested before the car gets assembled. So anything going in the 2020 model year has to be fully prepared by early 2019... And the chips have to appear in bulk by 2018. start to see these on the roads in 2019. And if you know anything about an

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