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Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

jalopnik.com

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Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#331

Post by panick21 »

karottenreibe wrote: post #329
panick21 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using 1 off cases based on unsubstantiated information in a lawsuit is not a persuasive argument for overall safety.

It's certainly a better argument than the GPs claim of "the safest cars out there" with 0 evidence given to substantiate that. I think it fair to refute such an unsubstantiated claim with a reported instance where safety was not maintained as can reasonably be expected.

Tesla cars have the highest safety ratings in the world and they have the the best active safety features and complete fleet compliance with their whole fleet for new standard of active safety features (literally the only company that does have that).

This is literally just the basic fact of the situation. If you want to disagree with literally every state safety agency in the world, then you are the one who needs to come up with real evidence.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#332

Post by panick21 »

csours wrote: post #328
panick21 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that Tesla actually has a process and good engineers and good models to understand their changes? Maybe they are simply more dynamic, have better on the fly testing, more flexible software to manage their production, are more vertically integrated and have thus more control over their production. The argument that Tesla had significant more quality problems compared to others really doesn't hold m…

>"Have you considered that Tesla actually has a process and good engineers and good models to understand their changes? Maybe they are simply more dynamic, have better on the fly testing, more flexible software to manage their production, are more vertically integrated and have thus more control over their production." Yes. That's cost of entry. It works when the customer takes delivery. They can also do smart things…

> You see this with the customer experience on repairs.

Most complaints about experience with repairs are more about how long it takes because of limited service centers, not actually bad service or overly broken cars.

On the other hand, many people have a really great experience as well. The mobile service is absurdly popular and make many repairs 10x better then what basically anybody else has.

In terms of 'check this individual horror story', you can find those for every car maker.

I have not yet seen any systematic real analysis on costumer experience for repair. The evidence seems to be based on individual stories.

Partly I think because Tesla is so integrated all repair problems are more directly associate with the company, while for other companies you just had a bad dealer experience.

I honestly don't know how to evaluate this in any systematic way, 'my friend had X problem with Tesla Service' is not good enough.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#333

Post by 01100011 »

panick21 wrote: post #312
ngrilly wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the video. Thanks for sharing. Powerful approach. But wondering how close it is from reality or not. Would be interested to know more.

I would suggest you watch the Munro Live videos where they disassemble and analyses cars. This company has been doing this for decades and recently started making some videos. The changes in Tesla vehicles are absurdly fast. They disassembled original Model 3 and then China Model 3, and since then the refresh 3 and the Y. Recently they showed the new Model 3 LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) and the electronics and how it…

How does that work out for maintainability? Is Tesla going to maintain parts inventory long enough to support owners for the lifetime of the vehicle(15-20 years?)?

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#334

Post by kazinator »

bsder wrote: post #287
VLM wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. In 2050 if your old 2035 Ford needs a new ECU you'll just stuck a somewhat newer and larger FPGA on it, and if the 2035 ECU needs three hardware I2C bus with clock stretching, one of which bus has to do 10 bit I2C addrs and it also needs three hardware PWM pins with 11 bit resolution and two 8051 cores running at 5.25 MHz each and two CANBUS, you (or more likely Fo…

> In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. People have been saying this for decades and it is no truer today than it was then. FPGAs and soft cores lose on cost and power--which are both ferociously tracked engineering goals when you have real volumes. To a first and second order, if all FPGAs suddenly disappeared, nobody would care. Networking and test equipment would get somewhat more expensive and doub…

Would a soft core which is 10 times smaller than the original chip being emulated always lose on power? What if it's clocked down so that the emulated chip doesn't run much faster than the original?

In automotive, is power so ferociously tracked? Most of the energy in a car is to get it moving, and even running the cabin fan requires more wattage than a reasonable control system.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#335

Post by bsder »

kazinator wrote: post #334
bsder wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. People have been saying this for decades and it is no truer today than it was then. FPGAs and soft cores lose on cost and power--which are both ferociously tracked engineering goals when you have real volumes. To a first and second order, if all FPGAs suddenly disappeared, nobody would care. Networking and test equipment would get somewhat more expensive and doub…

Would a soft core which is 10 times smaller than the original chip being emulated always lose on power? What if it's clocked down so that the emulated chip doesn't run much faster than the original? In automotive, is power so ferociously tracked? Most of the energy in a car is to get it moving, and even running the cabin fan requires more wattage than a reasonable control system.

> Would a soft core which is 10 times smaller than the original chip being emulated always lose on power?

If that were even possible (which it probably isn't--the fundamental "building block" of an FPGA is easily 10x the size of a similar fully custom gate), the soft core would still likely lose. Power in CMOS is proportional to C Vdd^2 f. Vdd hasn't moved in a while--so you've lost the biggest hammer in terms of power consumption. And C goes up when you change nodes--not down. And we're holding f constant according to your assumptions.

Furthermore, FPGAs are general purpose so they need things like clock spines that are optimized to work at their max frequency rather than at whatever frequency you chose. You burn a remarkable amount of power and area so that the chips can operate at say 400MHz even if you never run them faster than 8Mhz.

> In automotive, is power so ferociously tracked?

Not as such--automotive is generally more interested in whether your chip can survive power spikes. However, automotive is super sensitive to cost which is all about chip area.

> Most of the energy in a car is to get it moving

While true of ICE cars, that is less true than you might think with electric cars and regenerative braking. I can go for a very long time on 20mph roads between charges but the moment I get on a 65mph freeway, my battery gets sucked dry. I think atmospheric drag is something like to the third power of velocity--it's a really huge increase when you go even slightly faster.

However, as you point out, climate control is the real killer of energy--running AC or heating is power hungry.

In addition, the self-driving car folks discovered that running all that vision and radar and then processing it sucked down a remarkable amount of juice. Computes and sensors aren't exactly free.

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