Already a leader in mind share around artificial intelligence and self-driving technology, Nvidia unveiled at its GPU Technology Conference a new platform it promises will power fully autonomous vehicles.

Nvidia’s NVDA, -2.20% Drive PX Pegasus is a high-performance system that combines ARM-based processing cores with two yet-to-be-announced graphics chips offering as much as 10 times better performance than the previous best offering from the company. Though sampling and shipping won’t start until the second half of 2018, Nvidia has already announced a partnership with Deutsche Post DHL and ZF, both of Germany, to bring delivery trucks with full autonomy to roads in 2019.

“ Nvidia’s ship date of 2019 brings into question the validity of Tesla’s claims that it will offer fully autonomous vehicles with its current technology. ”

As with previous Drive PX systems, Nvidia is targeting the dozens of automakers and auxiliary technology companies that are working to build and create self-driving cars and infrastructure. This includes current customers like Tesla TSLA, +4.42% , Toyota TM, -0.55% , Volkswagen’s VOW, -3.20% Audi, Volvo and a host of secondary adopters like Uber, Lyft and Google GOOG, -2.37% GOOGL, -2.41% .

Read:Nvidia wants to put license-plate-sized data centers into self-driving taxis

Though the holy grail of this technology will see a self-driving car in every garage, Nvidia claims it will start with roll-outs in smaller, contained areas like college or business campuses, airports and even large leisure spots like Walt Disney World. As the acceptance of self-driving vehicles grows, leaders including Nvidia will be able to address enormous markets including taxis, emergency response and shipping, presenting a gold mine of opportunity.

Drive PX Pegasus clearly defines Nvidia as the leader in the autonomous-driving space from a technology and capability standpoint. It has dominated in compute performance for the gaming, graphics, enterprise and artificial-intelligence (AI) fields for several years, and translating that to self-driving cars is a move that will help steer the direction of the GPU giant.

There is still risk from companies that may decide to vertically integrate, like Google and Tesla, but Nvidia has created a significant lead over its competition with partnerships, development and the first true integrations in consumer products. Though Intel INTC, -0.85% has used acquisitions to speed up its own development in the field of autonomous driving, it has a colossal task to catch up to what Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has been able to achieve through adaption of its graphics processor portfolio.

Nvidia’s ship date of 2019 brings into question the validity of Tesla’s claims that it would be able to offer so-called Level 5 vehicle autonomy with current shipping cars and hardware. (Level 5 is the highest, requiring no driver invention, as stated by SAE, a standards body for the automotive industry.) With an improvement in performance of 10 times on the new Nvidia Drive PX Pegasus hardware, I expect safety advocates to begin questioning the power and capability of the systems in the Tesla Model S and Model X, both of which are currently powered by older Nvidia hardware.

This debate may also be a reason for the move by Tesla to bring chip and processing development in-house, as rumored last month.

From a technological perspective, Drive PX Pegasus is clearly a forward-looking device. It is capable of more than 320 trillion operations per second, an important trait when working with a stream of data from the system’s supported 16 cameras. Two custom ARM-based Xavier chips and two unannounced architecture-based discrete (separate) graphics chips provide the processing power to decipher the imagery input, manage driving tasks and monitor vehicle surroundings.

Nvidia has only just started shipping graphics processors based on the company’s Volta architecture for AI workloads and enterprise applications, but Drive PX Pegasus will use a design even newer than that. This indicates that there will be at a long wait before seeing mass production of the new autonomous-vehicle hardware, with extremely low volume sampling as much as a full year away. Whether this gives competing solutions enough time to incubate has yet to be seen.

Ryan Shrout is the founder and lead analyst at Shrout Research, and the owner of PC Perspective. Follow him on Twitter @ryanshrout.