AMD Accelerates Kodiak AI’s New Autonomous Driving Platform with EPYC Processors

AMD today announced that AMD EPYC processors are powering Kodiak AI’s seventh generation autonomous truck platform, delivering improved compute performance, processing speed and power efficiency for the Kodiak Driver autonomous driving system. Kodiak is the first autonomous trucking company to deploy advanced EPYC processors into their hardware platform. 

Driverless vehicles incorporate many sensors (such as LiDARs, radars, cameras) in order to detect vehicles, pedestrians, lane lines, roadway signs, and other objects. This generates huge streams of data every second. Ultra-fast processing speeds and high compute performance are critical needs for these data loads, as vehicles control sensing, thinking, and acting on the road.

“Autonomous driving requires massive processing capabilities to rapidly handle enormous amounts of sensor data while supporting increasingly sophisticated AI workloads,” said Don Burnette, Founder & CEO of Kodiak. “AMD EPYC CPUs are the best in the business, delivering the performance, scalability, and efficiency we need to continue advancing the Kodiak Driver and bringing autonomous trucking to commercial scale.”

Autonomous trucks demand exceptional CPU performance, requiring high core frequency (or clock speed) and enough PCIe lanes to process massive volumes of data at fast rates. AMD EPYC processors provide the Kodiak platform with 80 PCIe lanes and high core frequency – 3.15 GHz for base frequency with a max boost frequency of up to 4.4 GHz - delivering 25% higher clock speeds than the previous generation device. These hardware features enable Kodiak trucks to process heavy data loads more quickly and support increasingly sophisticated AI workloads for assessing surroundings and reacting in real-time. AMD EPYC CPUs handle path planning, localization, logistics, and timing-sensitive general-purpose processing to determine vehicle navigation. Large amounts of sensor data from cameras, LiDARs, and radars within Kodiak’s proprietary SensorPods are aggregated in the EPYC processor to be used for preprocessing and path-planning.

“Physical AI is pushing computing into some of the most complex and data-intensive environments in the world,” said Wayne Lyons, senior director, Automotive Market, AMD. “Kodiak is demonstrating what’s possible when advanced autonomous driving software is paired with high-performance AMD compute, and we’re excited to help provide the processing capabilities needed to move driverless trucking from innovation to real-world scale.”

Using leading, commercially available AMD EPYC processors allow Kodiak to focus its resources on quickly building scalable, production-ready autonomous truck platforms. The Kodiak and AMD collaboration is poised to help accelerate the launch of driverless trucks on public highways.

• Learn more about Kodiak AI (Kodiak AI | Autonomous Trucking & AI-Powered Ground Autonomy Solutions – Kodiak AI)
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AMD in Automotive

As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate in the automotive industry, the need for high-performance compute, compute acceleration and graphics technologies is increasing. AMD is a leader at this inflection point, with a broad line of high-performance CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and adaptive SoCs. From powering in-vehicle infotainment systems to advanced driver-assistance systems, autonomous driving and networking applications where functional safety is of paramount importance, AMD provides carmakers with a one-stop shop for silicon and software solutions. For more information, visit AMD's Automotive website.

About AMD

For more than 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies. Billions of people, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research institutions around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees are focused on building leadership high-performance and adaptive products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) website, blog, LinkedIn and Twitter pages.