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Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

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Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#121

Post by csours »

mwint wrote: post #110
csours wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I wonder if the balance is shifting towards taking action." I can't find a public source, but some actions are being taken. Bear in mind that any major shifts would happen in a new product, that is, something 5-7 years out.

Fundamentally, what is it that prevents the established auto makers from making changes mid lifecycle? Seems like Tesla keeps pulling it off; why can’t GM? Is it that the component specification+acquisition cycle you describe is optimized to take as long as the development cycle of a new car?

Small company risk is failure to grow. Big company risk is every other failure.

Tesla is valued as a growth/tech company. As long as people believe in their growth, they get more cash.

I don't personally understand how Tesla hasn't had more problems with their apparently uncontrolled engineering changes. At least part of it is customer enthusiasm for the product papering over any drawbacks.

It's not that GM can't make changes like this, it's that GM WON'T make changes like this.

All of this is, again, solely my own opinion.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#122

Post by api »

csours wrote: post #51

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not ca…

> OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility.

There are some great stories about SpaceX trying to source components this way and then finally ending up having to DIY.

What they found was that modern CAD and rapid prototyping made it easier than it used to be. Car companies would probably find the same thing, and have the luxury of doing it piecemeal at their own pace by gradually insourcing components in the order of necessity or benefit.

The “do not want to” part probably points to these companies being run by Ivy League MBAs educated in the 1990s and 2000s when this was conventional wisdom. The world is changing.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#123

Post by dale_glass »

coryrc wrote: post #116
dale_glass wrote: post #37

Wouldn't the solution be planning better? Sure, I understand that making a new car in combination with making a new ECU or brake controller on a new process is going to be stupidly dangerous and troublesome. So just don't. Rather than doing it as a part of a single project, there should be a department or separate company making the ECU/controller. This way when the semiconductor company moves forwards, ECU Group sta…

Your comment displays a breathtaking amount of ignorance.

Then I welcome the opportunity to learn about something new. Please explain what's wrong, I'm most interested.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#124

Post by lostlogin »

gedy wrote: post #98
radicalbyte wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally took me years to understand it - how can you accelerate by accident? Until someone mentioned that all of these cars were automatics. But every automatic I've ever driven (not many - I prefer a clutch) moves forward unless you're pushing the break in. In the rest state, it's in motion. The problem isn't Toyota, the problem is a broken system.

People panic and jam the wrong (or both) pedals. (There are quite a few people who use two feet to drive automatics, one foot for break, other for gas..)

> There are quite a few people who use two feet to drive automatics

They are very irritating to drive behind. Some seem to keep pressure on the brake pedal, and the brake lights stay on as they accelerate. When they slow it takes longer to realise they are braking as the lights have been solidly on.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#125

Post by andi999 »

wrycoder wrote: post #102
shiftpgdn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota accelerator-gate is largely a farce. Almost all of the people involved with Toyota unintended acceleration were over the age of 65 and had the poorly designed loose floor mats in their cars. Even if they had perfect readable John Carmack tier coding they still would have lost.

Easy to do. I stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake once. First impulse is to step harder, until you realize what’s going on. If your realization is slow, bad things can happen. If bad things happen, the tendency is to blame someone else.

One solid step on the accelerator easily let's bad things happen below 1s.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#126

Post by coryrc »

AbbeSomething wrote: post #63

Is a part of the problem that the chips they are depending on are so trivial and small that you would end up losing more when cutting it up on a smaller process? I guess there is a limit to how many chips you could put on a single wafer even if the chip was only a single gate? Maybe the old nodes are efficient enough for the chips they need. Then again it would make sense to update designs frequently enough to stay a…

Capital costs of a fab are the single highest cost of producing chips. So long as the fab is running it's cheap to keep running so little reason to spend money to put cheap things on other processes (which is an expensive design cost) when you can later switch to a more complex chip (which should allow you to reduce supporting components too) which takes advantage of the new process size.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#127

Post by coryrc »

nbernard wrote: post #68

But for the cost, couldn't (for instance) a 16nm fab produce 90nm chips? If not, how complex would it be to "port" an existing 90nm chip, to produce a 16nm revision? Impossible, or quite easy but not cost effective? From the POV of the car companies, could such revisions be used directly, or would they need to be qualified in the same fashion as new parts?

No and about as expensive as having designed it in the first place. Given design costs are the largest portion of per-unit costs it's not a good investment.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#128

Post by tziki »

baybal2 wrote: post #34
01100011 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Tesla plays fast and loose, treating their product like a manufacturer of consumer electronics and not a manufacturer of a dangerous and durable good. That obviously allows them to out-compete other auto manufacturers who are more aware of things like product liability. See the Toyota accelerator-gate lawsuits. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... : > However, on…

It is very troubling development when doing something so trivial even requires a computer. That's a matter readily solved by a PID controller made of a few dozen 74XXX parts. Possibly made n-times redundant. Even a more fancy LP solver probably wouldn't need a fully fledged computer.

Ah the classic HN "just use this things I just came up with".

https://xkcd.com/793/

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#129

Post by andi999 »

AlfeG wrote: post #114
radicalbyte wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally took me years to understand it - how can you accelerate by accident? Until someone mentioned that all of these cars were automatics. But every automatic I've ever driven (not many - I prefer a clutch) moves forward unless you're pushing the break in. In the rest state, it's in motion. The problem isn't Toyota, the problem is a broken system.

Not sure how is this possible. Automatic cars almost always require You to push brake constantly if you not driving. You can't turn car on without pressing brake, can't change to drive mode from parking state without pressing brake. There should be something very broken in Toyota case.

Automatic handbreak at a traffic light?

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#130

Post by rightbyte »

tremon wrote: post #111
finnh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10K global variables sounds insane, until i realize "oh, huh, we have that too, we just call it _config_". Almost every place we would have a constant (tuning parameters, etc) we instead have a configurable value with the likely default declared in code, but all overridable in config. Managing config can be a hassle, but the number of times we've merely had to tweak a value rather than roll a new build pays for itsel…

I always interpreted the "10K global variables" to mean 10K directly accessible, heap-allocated symbols. It's a code reek. If you use a configuration object or other abstraction, the number of accessible variables may not change, but their scope and access method does. It's a matter of interpretation I guess, but I would not classify a wrapper object (like .Net's ConfigurationManager singleton) as "10K global variabl…

If they used Simulink, the model output and input, aswell as state, are global variables when generated to C in some settings.
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