Kodiak AI has announced a collaboration with AMD to implement the AMD EPYC Series processors to power Kodiak’s seventh-generation autonomous truck platform.
Kodiak says it is the first company to deploy AMD EPYC processors in a driverless trucking hardware platform. The high-performance CPUs provide the computing power needed to aggregate and preprocess the large volumes of sensor data required by Kodiak’s autonomous driving system.
“Physical AI is pushing computing into some of the most complex and data-intensive environments in the world,” said Wayne Lyons, senior director for the automotive market at AMD. “Kodiak is demonstrating what’s possible when advanced autonomous driving software is paired with high-performance AMD compute. Together with Kodiak, AMD is providing the processing capabilities needed to move driverless trucking from innovation to significant scale.”
Driverless trucks demand exceptional central processing unit (CPU) performance. Within the seventh-generation Kodiak Driver, AMD EPYC CPUs aggregate sensor data, preprocess information collected by lidar, cameras and radars, and support the path-planning processes that determine how the vehicle safely and efficiently navigates complex environments.
“Physical AI requires compute capabilities that can rapidly handle enormous amounts of sensor data while supporting increasingly sophisticated AI workloads,” said Don Burnette, the founder and CEO of Kodiak. “AMD delivers best-in-class CPU technology with the performance, scalability and efficiency required for advanced autonomous driving applications. AMD EPYC CPUs give us the compute capabilities we need to advance the Kodiak Driver and continue commercializing autonomous trucking.”
AMD EPYC processors are designed to handle latency-sensitive autonomous-driving workloads such as sensor processing, localization and path planning. For Kodiak, the higher clock speeds and lower power consumption of the latest processors enable faster data processing while supporting more advanced AI workloads.
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