Chinese information technology company Inspur has announced that search engine giant Baidu plans to use the "NF5568M4 server" to support its autonomous vehicle technology. The server is expected to support Baidu's deep learning and image recognition platforms, which will be used for the company's self-driving cars.

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In the autonomous vehicle race, Baidu is going head to head against foreign rivals - such as Google - as it aims to set up demonstrations in ten different cities in China. Recently, the company announced plans to launch a trial zone in the Chinese city of Wuhu in which it will begin tests in limited areas for the next five years.

After the first three-year period, Baidu said the trial area will then be expanded to include public highways and the entire city of Wuhu, hopefully leading to the commercialization of the service. Earlier this year, the company also revealed it will conduct tests in the United States as well.

In December 2015, Baidu already carried out a successful road test in Beijing, in which one of its self-driving cars was able to move about from the Baidu Tower in the Zhongguancun High-tech Park, passing the Olympic Forest Park, and returning back.

Baidu's self-driving cars employ image recognition technology - part of computer vision - in order to sense various objects in the environment. Thanks to Inspur's server and GPU power, it is said that Baidu was able to reach a recognition precision of 90 percent.

Specs-wise, the NF5568M4 "co-processing acceleration server" is said to feature two Intel E5-2600v3 processors and four Nvidia Tesla K40 graphics processing units. Based in Jinan, Shandong, Inspur has partnered with American GPU and SOC maker NVIDIA, which is currently the world's biggest vision computing company.

TagsBaidu Inc., Baidu Driverless Vehicle, Self-Driving Vehicle, Autonomous Cars, Inspur Server