14 DAY TRIAL // The California-based fabless GPU and ARM CPU designer, American company Nvidia has tapped into the automotive industry and it seems to be making tens of millions of dollars just by working with the famous German automotive giant Volkswagen/Audi.
The well-known Tegra 2 SoC is a dual-core ARM implementation and, for the onboard computer systems, it seems to provide enough performance for the driver information part as well as the entertainment part.
The new Volkswagen Golf VII will reportedly also use an Nvidia Tegra chip and, while we don’t know yet if it’s a Tegra 2 or a quad core Tegra 3, the company will likely ship more than 10 million of such processors only in this model.
Volkswagen’s Golf VII will likely be a bestseller just like all the other Golf models, but the mainstream cars are not the only ones using Nvidia’s processors.
The extremely good-looking Lamborghini Aventador also uses a Tegra SoC and, although it won’t ship in the same quantity as the Golf IV, it is yet another testament to Nvidia’s popularity among the auto makers.
Thinking just how much a Lamborghini Aventador costs, we believe that the Tegra SoC cost is negligible and thus it’s interesting that Nvidia was chosen against old and highly influential embedded expert companies such as Texas Instruments or Marvell.
On the other hand, once the auto entertainment system becomes more demanding, it will be interesting to see if companies like AMD will be able to get a piece of the action.
