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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

#231

Post by mcguire »

panick21 wrote: post #192
syntaxing wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work and worked for subsidiaries of big automakers but this opinion is of my own. I would guess it’s a mixture of culture, cost, and scale. Culture wise, Tesla is extremely vertically integrated so that gives them a lot more breathing room. Cost wise, Tesla pretty much still sells car at a loss and relies heavily on carbon offset subsidies for income. When your revenue is established, trying to change m…

> Cost wise, Tesla pretty much still sells car at a loss and relies heavily on carbon offset subsidies for income. I'm sorry but that is just straight up complete nonsense. Like seriously, you are directly disagreeing with public financial statements. We know exactly how much margin Tesla has, with and without carbon offset. The simple fact is, Tesla has leading automotive margins even when you exclude any carbon cre…

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd go strongly either way.

According to reports (https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/tesla-profitability...) Tesla received $1600M in regulatory credits and had a net income of $721M.

If you look at the 10K (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021...), Tesla received $27,236M in automotive revenues (which includes sales of regulatory credits, thanks Elon). The corresponding cost of sales is $20,259M giving gross profit of $6,977M and gross margin of 26%. But after that, you have operating expenses ($4,636M) (blah, blah, interest, taxes, other, blah) and a final net income of $721M.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#232

Post by phkahler »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #103
phkahler wrote: post #91

Give me a microcontroller with between 32K and 2MB of onboard flash, some eeprom, multiple CAN peripherals, ADC, SPI, good timers, and some specialized peripherals - synched PWMs with dead time for driving power electronics, and some other special things. Dual-core lockstep for safety critical things (like the fronk latch). Some combination of all that at a price starting under a dollar. Oh, and a temperature range o…

ESP32 satisfies each of your requirement. They are available for $1(without BT sensor) in bulk pricing, have 4MB flash, have eeprom, have CAN, ADC, SPI, goof timers, good PWM, good DAC, is realtime, dualcore, and ambient temperature range of -40 to +125 C.

ESP is close. I was poking at Intel claiming they could help when they dont have anything close and wouldn't want to for the price.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#233

Post by formerly_proven »

perl4ever wrote: post #226
formerly_proven wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking those are not purely brake by wire. The master cylinder is still mechanically connected to the pedal. However, in normal conditions the brake actuation will be performed over wire.

This is a question of semantics, but I don't understand your usage of "purely". How can it not be "purely" brake by wire, if, when depressing the brake pedal, the friction brakes are not always triggered? If electronics decide not to apply hydraulic force when everything is going fine, that there must be a potential failure mode where they ignore the pedal inappropriately. Can you explain further?

In a brake-by-wire car, if you stomp on the brake pedal with all you've got you end up engaging a cylinder that can directly exert force on the front brakes, even if the electronics are fully dead. (Maybe there are some systems where the brake pedal is truly just a "dimmer switch", but I've not been able to find them).

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#234

Post by seabrookmx »

tantony wrote: post #179
rampant_ai wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging efficiency isn't 100%, so you'd have to tow it further than the range you need. Seems like it'd make more sense to just tow it to a charger.

> Charging efficiency isn't 100%, so you'd have to tow it further than the range you need That's not how it works. You basically get 5 mpg or less on the truck, while the car charges at significantly higher rates than the speed of the truck (in mph), because the car is more efficient at using the energy. https://insideevs.com/news/514727/tesla-towing-70mph-fast-ch... Towing at 70mph in the above example was charging…

The comment you replied to is still correct though.

Distance wise, tow charging makes no sense. Energy wise, maybe it does.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#235

Post by syshum »

hinkley wrote: post #218
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…

The suppliers are running in pretty thin margins aren’t they? Did they really have any choice but to cancel those orders or potentially go bankrupt? If you sit on someone’s shoulders and forget that they’re doing most of the work, you can be shocked all you want when they collapse out from under you but nobody on the ground is going to have any sympathy at all for you. I’ve worked for software subcontractors and it’s…

Automotive is notorious in MFG for being one of the WORST industries to be a supplier in (at least for US Based Suppliers). Low Margins, and unrealistic demands by the big brands.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#236

Post by sbierwagen »

csense wrote: post #201

I always thought chips were dominated by fixed capital costs of fabs. If they were dominated by variable material cost of wafers, as the article seems to imply, it wouldn't make sense that we see 90nm microcontrollers that sell for $1 and a high-end 16nm PC CPU that sell for $1000. So the question is, what's the reason that 90nm microcontroller sells for $1? I'm trying, and failing, to figure out an economic model th…

Chips made on modern processes are dominated by capital costs. Old chips are made on old foundries, which are fully depreciated and therefore have no capital costs. If you made a 90nm foundry today, then it probably couldn't sell those microcontrollers for less than $100 each, just like a modern CPU.

>why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage?

They can't do it fast enough. Standing up a new foundry takes years under the best circumstances, and today you couldn't do it all, since all the tooling is sold out and deeply backordered. If GM could snap their fingers today and magic a cleanroom into existence, they'd still be waiting a hell of a long time to put tools in it.

Secondly on the price question, microcontrollers just have way fewer gates than a desktop CPU. A dozen registers, a thousand bytes of RAM, a few kilobytes of flash. This makes them physically smaller, which lets you put more on a wafer, and makes the unit price cheaper. The total die area of the ATmega8 is just 7.9 square millimeters... at the 500nm node! https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 This gets you 8,100 dies from a single 300mm wafer. (If there are any 300mm foundries at 500nm, which there probably aren't)

Thirdly, what makes you think anyone could build a 90nm foundry at all?

Take a look at a list of foundries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... I don't see anything making 90nm after 2014.

Which makes sense. Fabs don't make all their tools in-house, that's done by vendors. As an example of one tool, by one vendor, the NXE:3400B EUV stepper by ASML. Unit cost, $175 million: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order

These are ultra-bespoke, super-low-volume machine tools. ASML makes a couple dozen or a hundred steppers of a given model, then shuts down production and starts upgrading to the next node. Is it even possible to buy a new 90nm stepper today?

I'm sure they have all the documentation and could roll back to the previous generation easily enough, if they had to. (Which they don't! They are maxed out just supplying current-gen tools) But given all the voodoo in semiconductor lithography, people retiring etc, I bet that rolling back two decades would pretty much require starting from scratch.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#237

Post by syshum »

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…

>>>To my knowledge, GM did not cancel any chip orders, because GM itself had no chip orders (this is oversimplified).

Come on, Really? So GM cancelled the orders for all the tings that the chips go in, and you want to spin that as "well technically GM did not cancel the chips"

That is bullshit.... The supply chain does not work like that, if GM cancels an order for 100,000 ECM's the supplier for the ECM is going to cancel their order for 100,000 chips for them to make the ECM for GM, it is unrealitic to believe anything else would happen.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#238

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#239

Post by giantrobot »

thoughtstheseus wrote: post #119
01100011 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that's not related to the point I'm making. The point is that not following software design best practices can leave you open to liability, or at least put you in such a weak legal position that you are compelled to settle. If/when Tesla gets hauled into court over its software flaws, any lack of adherence to best practices will make the company appear negligent.

This is a risk adverse culture then. Tesla is spending gobs of money specifically on building safer if not the safest cars out there.

> building safer if not the safest cars out there

Unless the car loses power and catches fire. Then you can't open the fucking doors [0].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/23/man-died-...

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#240

Post by novok »

hinkley wrote: post #218
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…

The suppliers are running in pretty thin margins aren’t they? Did they really have any choice but to cancel those orders or potentially go bankrupt? If you sit on someone’s shoulders and forget that they’re doing most of the work, you can be shocked all you want when they collapse out from under you but nobody on the ground is going to have any sympathy at all for you. I’ve worked for software subcontractors and it’s…

I don't think money is a problem in this specific case. Because of car shortage conditions they can afford to add a few hundred dollars to the MSRP and pay more for non-cutting edge chips and still come out fine.
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