Entertainment on wheels
From 2021, Tesla switches the brain of infotainment from an Intel Atom chip to an AMD Ryzen chip. Which can power Elon Musk’s vision to turn Tesla into a powerful game console better. The upgrade also pumps up the performance significantly as UI is much more responsive and apps load faster.
No free lunch
Nevertheless, the performance comes with a cost: power. People start to notice AMD Ryzen can affect the car range. For example a driver reported 3.5 % reduced (-22 km/ 14 miles) in the driving range of Tesla Model 3. AMD Ryzen Embedded uses 45W. Whereas Intel Atom E3950 uses 12W. Without adding that for AMD Radeon GPU, the performance already costs 33Wh more. Obviously for EV, better computing performance, power & price will be increasing important with increasing app usage in cars. So, how might Tesla do better next?
The mini-mill story for x86
‘When I finished the mini-mill story, Andy said, “I got it. What it means for Intel is…” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to lunch the lower-priced Celeron processor.’ — Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life
This CES, Intel empire strikes back by claiming “the fastest mobile processor” by comparing oranges to Apple’s. Sure, It’s appealing for some, such as gaming laptops. Thanks to PC games. But more are embracing Apple’s M1 phase change as new SoC fabrication & packaging technologies keep squeezing more performance per watt. For example, Samsung is also adding AMD GPU to Exynos 2200 mobile SoC to gear up its game.
This is also happening for cars. In Nov. 2021, NVIDIA announced its DRIVE Orin SoC can serve 4 different computation for cars starting production in 2022. Sooner of later, Tesla as the “Apple of EV” should follow the same footstep. This is nothing new to Tesla since it has switched from NVIDIA’s to Tesla’s own full self-driving chip in HW 3.0. With both NVIDIA DRIVE Orin & Tesla HW 4.0 chip are allegedly using 7 nm technology, it’ll be very interesting to see how they compare. Wishing it’ll be a fair comparison, apples-to-apples 😉.
Full Disclosure
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company. They are mostly extrapolations from public information. I don’t have insider knowledge of those companies, nor a whatever expert.
