Software vs hardware

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rikimaru
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Post by rikimaru »

Anyone know what kind of processor is used for the infotainment system?

Wondering whether the laggy software is because it’s just not optimised well or if it’s down to underpowered hardware.
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turntoport
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Post by turntoport »

I'd be inclined to look at the coding process(es) first - presumably it's an mbs (model-based-system) that has been autocoded directly from the model. The autocoders are rarely (ok, Doubtless the model is very complex, given all the possible permutations of build standard, any chip swaps due to spec shortages would wildly exacerbate the normal difficulties of version control vs bugfix. If vw are happy to up-issue numerous times without creating an obsolescence issue, then the original spec hardware must have been reasonably 'capable'. Hopefully.
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chrisfs
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Post by chrisfs »

Eh?

😉
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Post by G43FAN »

I suppose you'd hope that VW realised that a lot of cars will be back on their forecourts at 3 - 4 years and therefore built in at least that amount of longevity in the hardware on board.

There was a marked improvement with 2.1 and I think 2.3 brought stability more than any speed improvment. I've always thought that initial start up was down to all the various modules greeting each other, in operation the system is nowhere near as bad as some others I have used (as long as you stop it looking for WiFi Networks).
rikimaru
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Post by rikimaru »

Hmm I’m sure some of the issues can be fixed with software improvements. But judging from the previews of 3.0 (their 5th major software iteration?, it doesn’t really look that snappy and still has some perceivable latency when using the menus.

The preview we saw of 3.1 and the games in particular did not give me a lot of confidence in its longevity, considering what they showed off is the sort of thing you’d see on devices from 15+ years ago.

It would be good to actually confirm what kind of hardware VW opted for so we can tell how future proof it is.
16 Sep: ID3 Max in Moonstone Grey. BW 40 confirmed. ETA early Dec.
...lots of bad info and delays...
27 April: at port. ETA end of May.
Delivery ETA: 18 May!
Dbaron
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Post by Dbaron »

I believe it's this chip https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/ ... s#overview

That's used for Continental's ICAS
https://www.continental.com/en/press/pr ... 2-icas-vw/

Then the ICAS goes into MEB vehicles. I'm not sure which version of the R-Car-M3e goes in the Id.3
Dbaron
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Post by Dbaron »

To give you an idea of performance it has 2x ARM cortex a57 cores (performance cores) and 4x ARM a53 (efficiency cores)

In 2015 (7 years ago) The Samsung Galaxy S6 had 4x a57 cores and 4x a53 cores. So CPU wise it's less powerful than a 7 year old smart phone.

BTW the a57 architecture was released in 2012.

Graphics processing. It uses the Imagination PowerVR GX6250.

Looking at its 32bit FLOAT performance, it's 57GFLOPs. Compare this to an iPhone 13 (2021 model) which it's GPU can hit 1,500GFLOPs. So an iPhone has around 26x more graphics performance than this.

I'm a software engineer for one of the big 4 tech companies and my personal opinion is - The CPU isn't great but is relatively fine. The GPU on the other hand is complete pants.
rikimaru
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Post by rikimaru »

Wow, thanks for the info. I never expected it to be anywhere close to the specs in a Tesla but this is not impressive at all.

Considering the ID3 was announced in 2016 and didn't actually enter production until 2018/2019, I don't understand why they went with a then 6 year old chip and GPU.
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...lots of bad info and delays...
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Delivery ETA: 18 May!
alex1337
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Post by alex1337 »

As a software engineer if you optimize well, you can make something run better on lower spec hardware. Or you can make badly optimized software run better by throwing better hardware it... unfortunately VW has done neither of these at the moment.
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Dbaron
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Post by Dbaron »

alex1337 wrote: Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:49 pm As a software engineer if you optimize well, you can make something run better on lower spec hardware. Or you can make badly optimized software run better by throwing better hardware it... unfortunately VW has done neither of these at the moment.
Agree also by having lower spec hardware and needing to optimize all the time slows down development. Meaning releases take longer, if they had a powerhouse of a chip you can throw code out of the door faster. So lower spec hardware means longer development lifecycles.

Why did they go for old stuff? Simply they don't understand technology (getting better as time passes). The decision will have been go to existing supplier and ask for lowest price per unit box. To them the SoC was just another part, same as tyre or door handle. They didn't understand how important the SoC is as this runs everything the customer interacts with. Get this wrong and your software strategy will go south.

Apple, Google, Amazon, and Tesla design their own silicon (and contract direct to chip designers directly like AMD, Qualcomm etc) because they understand the intrinsic logic between hardware and software.

To be fair to VW they are learning and getting better. For me the MEB platform that underpins the id.3 is VW's first attempt at EVs and learning to become more software focused. The MEB shelf life will be short, VW know it's got a lot of issues. They're working on a new platform to be up and running in 2026 that will allow them to compete with Telsa. So I'm afraid of you're worried about the car becoming obsolete....the writing is already on the wall.

New platform: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswa ... 0brands%22.


New Battery:
https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/ ... werco-8050

My guess is they won't do anything radical with MEB now it will just be small improvements. With the new platform it looks like a step change in the battery will come as well. I'm guessing much improved silicon as well.

Basically us id.3 owners are buying a first attempt product all the learning will seen in SSP. Another thing to be fair to VW, Tesla have been building the Model S for 10 years now and their learnings have been applied to the likes of the model 3 and Y. VW need to get this early learning out of the way. For me the Id.3 was (when I bought) nearly £10k cheaper than the model 3 and I've accepted it's warts and all.
Repfigit
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Post by Repfigit »

Putting in a modern CPU doesn't make much of a difference if the software isn't optimised. The range of things you will be trying to do with your car is somewhat limited compared to a smartphone. An older CPU will only really show shortcomings if you start running code not optimised for it - e.g. if you have a web browser like on a Tesla.

A lot can be done with not a lot of CPU, so long as you concentrate on the things that matter. The original iPhone was comically slow compared to any modern phone but it could feel just as snappy. Why? Because when you did something that needed snappiness, the phone didn't try to do anything else. If you held a scroll pane in the rubber-banding section you'd see that basically nothing else happened in the meantime. The CPU was pretty much entirely dedicated to keeping that scrolling animation as smooth as possible. Being able to make a bit of progress on a background task wasn't important, so it just didn't happen.w
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OB1CCFC
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Post by OB1CCFC »

The obvious question here is ‘do other EV manufacturers use better/faster CPU’s and GPU’s?’
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turntoport
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Post by turntoport »

Chrisfs; sorry, bad editing in my previous post - should have read "...The autocoders are rarely (ok, doubtless the model is very complex, given all the possible permutations of build standard),...".
In complex systems code is rarely written directly these days, it would take (far) too long. 'Models' are used to simplify system design and functionality, each part of the model having it's own code already written for it. The vw meb, as Dbaron indicates, is already quite old and was probably optimised for a lower cost-performance point than more expensive vehicles, but vw probably weren't too concerned with 'game of thrones' players when they were deciding what update rates to use for the core system, etc...
Fwiw; a small insight into mbs (model-based-systems) here:
https://uk.mathworks.com/help/systemcom ... adata.html

Each model component will have a range of 'inputs' driving it, hence a range of outputs. Most functional models feed their output data upward to higher-level models which integrate the shedload of datapoints output from their servants, and so on. By the time this all gets to the level we drive the car at (the 'Human-Machine-Interface, HMI), there's an absolute shitload of data going back and forth.
[Good comments from Dbaron, alex1337 and Repfigit.]

Hope that's not granny egg-sucking territory, but is only intended for the non-softies amongst us.
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Dbaron
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Post by Dbaron »

OB1CCFC wrote: Thu Jul 14, 2022 7:10 am The obvious question here is ‘do other EV manufacturers use better/faster CPU’s and GPU’s?’
I know the new Model S and X have GPU with around 10,000Gflop compared to Id.3 57Gflop GPU.

The model 3 and model y have the discreet GPU removed and rely on the APU integrated GPU. I'd guess that would be around 1,000-3,000Gflops based on some AMD spec sheets for similar APUs.

The CPU part are x86 based so are much bigger and much more powerful.

The good thing with Tesla is the APU has 4 homogeneous cores, meaning they are all of the same performance. It's easier to write optimized code because you don't have to think about what core is doing what. In the VW solution, they have 2 performance cores and 4 low performance efficiency cores. With this you need to optimize the scheduler to ensure which CPU core is handling which thread. The performance core and efficient core architecture is good for things like mobile phones where you have a 4watt hour battery and you need it to last all day. But when you have a 58,000watt hour battery erm........ you're just making your life harder in the software world.
Dbaron
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Post by Dbaron »

I've also noticed the my22.5 cars are shipping with v3 software have Hardware H30 compared to the cars prior to this have Hardware H20. This H30 could be an improved SoC and v3 was written for it (likely to be a small improvement such as higher clock speeds, rather than a completely different SoC) . VW are now working out how to make it work on H20 😂😂, which is why it's taking so long. This is only speculation.

But for example look at Google, they release the latest version of Android on their newest Pixel hardware first then the older models get the update. This is common practice.
OB1CCFC
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Post by OB1CCFC »

Dbaron wrote: Thu Jul 14, 2022 8:49 am
OB1CCFC wrote: Thu Jul 14, 2022 7:10 am The obvious question here is ‘do other EV manufacturers use better/faster CPU’s and GPU’s?’
I know the new Model S and X have GPU with around 10,000Gflop compared to Id.3 57Gflop GPU.

The model 3 and model y have the discreet GPU removed and rely on the APU integrated GPU. I'd guess that would be around 1,000-3,000Gflops based on some AMD spec sheets for similar APUs.

The CPU part are x86 based so are much bigger and much more powerful.

The good thing with Tesla is the APU has 4 homogeneous cores, meaning they are all of the same performance. It's easier to write optimized code because you don't have to think about what core is doing what. In the VW solution, they have 2 performance cores and 4 low performance efficiency cores. With this you need to optimize the scheduler to ensure which CPU core is handling which thread. The performance core and efficient core architecture is good for things like mobile phones where you have a 4watt hour battery and you need it to last all day. But when you have a 58,000watt hour battery erm........ you're just making your life harder in the software world.
Thanks. I guess I’m a bit more interested in what the likes of Hyundai/Kia do.
The other question is how much of this hardware, software issue is ‘EV related’. Is there an added level of complexity for EV’s?
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monkeyhanger
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Post by monkeyhanger »

I'd have thought that an ICE car with similar driver aid systems and a complex EU6 compliant engine with particulate and NOx management would be just as complex. The Golf MK8 seems to have a lot of the software problems of the ID3, and some of their issues have been slower to fix than the ID3's.
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OB1CCFC
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Post by OB1CCFC »

monkeyhanger wrote: Thu Jul 14, 2022 10:32 am I'd have thought that an ICE car with similar driver aid systems and a complex EU6 compliant engine with particulate and NOx management would be just as complex. The Golf MK8 seems to have a lot of the software problems of the ID3, and some of their issues have been slower to fix than the ID3's.
Yes MH that would also be my view. And if so, they’ve had many years of experience with these type of systems and shouldn’t be seriously messing up…
They’ve tried to cut to the bone and gone a little bit too deep methinks.
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colonelpurple
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Post by colonelpurple »

underpowered, but seriously, is at most a second. doesn't bother me at all.
sometimes my phone does it as well , learnt to be patient with electronic devices ...
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