BlackBerry today announced the early access release of QNX Software Development Platform (SDP) 8.0 to enable automakers and IoT systems developers to deliver more powerful products at lower costs, while maintaining high safety, security and reliability. 

Powered by its new next generation QNX operating system (OS), the company’s highest performance, safe and secure embedded OS ever, SDP 8.0 is designed to realise the performance potential of the increasing number of multi-core processors that automakers and IoT systems developers are selecting for their products and is the result of utilising BlackBerry QNX’s leading IP and unique experience in high performance EDGE computing.

QNX SDP 8.0 lays the foundation for the next generation BlackBerry QNX product portfolio, including next generation QNX OS for Safety, QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety, allowing developers to reap the benefits of this new technology irrespective of which BlackBerry QNX technology best suits their requirement.

“The automotive industry is redefining software in the vehicle,” said John Wall, Senior Vice President, and Head of BlackBerry QNX. “Automotive architectures are transitioning to zonal, central compute and ultimately Software Defined Vehicles. The top to bottom scalability inherent to SDP 8.0, the QNX OS for Safety and the QNX Hypervisor makes this a natural choice for automakers looking for a total car OS.”

BlackBerry is working with NVIDIA to integrate the QNX OS microkernel on the next-generation NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which delivers 2000 TFLOPS of performance and consolidates automated driving with AI cockpit on a single centralised platform.

The early access release of QNX SDP 8.0 is available now for evaluation and product development. General availability is scheduled for later in 2023.