The U.S.-based chipmaker NVIDIA officially launched NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, a highly advanced software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles, at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2019), marking the company ushering in a new era of AI computing and software for autonomous driving.

The platform is powered by a new SoC (system-on-a-chip) called Orin, which is born out of the data center and consists of 17 billion transistors, according to the chip maker's introduction.

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NVIDIA said the chip is able to deliver 200 trillion operations per second, nearly seven-fold increase over the previous generation SoC Xaiver, and is engineered to process a whopping amount of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots.

Thanks to its compatibility with Xavier, Orin allows developers to leverage their existing development investments. Boasting great scalability, the platform contains a wide range of configurations that support Level 2+ AI-enabled assistance driving to Level 5 fully driverless operation.

The first production of the fruit of four-year R&D is expected for launch in 2022, said the company.