Volvo’s ES90 sedan will be built with a Nvidia supercomputer

Volvo’s next electric vehicle, the ES90 midsized luxury sedan, sounds like its got some serious computing chops.

The new EV will come with a dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin configuration, making it the “most powerful car Volvo ever created in terms of core computing capacity,” the company claims today. The new supercomputer is included as part of a single tech stack called Superset, which Volvo says will underpin all of its next-gen vehicles going forward.

The ES90 will be Volvo’s first vehicle to come with the Nvidia’s system-on-a-chip, enabling it to perform core functions at lightning fast speeds thanks to the computer’s abilities to perform 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This will come handy when managing functionalities such as “AI-based, state-of-the-art active safety features, car sensors and efficient battery management.”

Orin system also represents an “eightfold” improvement in processing speeds over the San Jose-based chipmaker’s Xavier computer that featured in the 2018 announcement of a team-up between Volvo and Nvidia on in-car hardware. The increased processing power to enable Volvo to gradually enhance its deep learning model and neural network “from 40 million to 200 million parameters,” the company says.

The ES90 will be built on Volvo’s SPA2 architecture and will be the second vehicle, after the EX90, to be based on its Superset tech stack. Superset is a modular engineering platform that the company says will be used to make safer cars, more efficiently, and to improve them over time through over-the-air software updates.

Tesla was the first company to introduce the idea of a connected vehicle with updateable software that could improve over timne. Now, the rest of the industry is scrambling to catch up by introducing their own upgradable vehicles. Volvo’s EX90 was intended to be the first major effort, but the electric SUV was delayed by software troubles, and when it eventually arrived it lacked many of its promised features.

Volvo says it envisions a future in which features such as driver assist technology and battery range are able to be improved over time thanks to this new tech stack. And improvements for the EX90 will be translatable to the ES90, and vice versa.

“The Volvo ES90 is one of the most technically advanced cars on the market today and is designed to be improved further with time,” says Anders Bell, Volvo’s chief engineering and technology officer, in a statement. “Built on our state-of-the-art Superset tech stack, the ES90 puts safety at the forefront.”