Joined
·
422 Posts
I have said this elsewhere, but I find the idea that the CPU has been upgraded in the 2023 model year to be at best unfounded and probably highly unlikely. Now, there is a possibility that it's shifted to a different CPU because of a supply chain issues but that's not necessarily going to be any better than what we have. One of the actual GOOD things about them picking an x86 platform for our cars is that sourcing CPU's becomes much easier so long as you're flexible with your specs.
Given that Android is designed to run on slow, low-power CPU's I don't think we'd see nearly the improvement in performance we think we might. I don't have the specific CPU that's in our cars but I have a very similar-specced CPU here among my bits and parts that I actually do run Android on for development purposes. It's plenty fast... in fact it still thrashes almost everything else I've played with that runs Android except in very corner use cases. The main difference between my dev board and the one in our cars is actually memory space; mine has 8GB of RAM while I seem to recall the one in our cars has 4. Now, even that shouldn't make a huge difference because while a low memory situation will cause some performance degradation, 4GB of RAM is almost certainly more than enough for the application sets we're running on the cars. And because of the nature of the car systems we're not trying to run 12 different apps at once along with some random game... automotive systems are FAR more focused and if you think it through we're not running more than 3-4 apps at a time.
The only app I've tried to run where a significant slowdown is noticeable is ABRP. However, I suspect that's actually a combination of slow storage and an app that's really not optimized properly for the Intel platform because it was originally targeted for ARM. I have noticed it's getting better with each new release too, so I suspect they're working on it. The storage in our cars again I'm not sure but in these classes of boards is usually eMMC rather than an SSD because it's usually more cost effective. I might be wrong on this but it would seem to make sense. The occasional slowdowns in Google Maps are probably equal parts LTE drops/reconnects and the aforementioned slow storage. Nothing else I've noticed would indicate that the CPU is in any way constrained running the apps we have. In fact the fact that the Vivaldi browser works so well could well be attributed to the car having plenty of horsepower to spare.
I realize most of this is conjecture but I spent MANY years working in embedded systems and know a lot about how these work and also the business decisions behind upgrades and modifications. And besides, this thread is all about conjecture, isn't it?
Given that Android is designed to run on slow, low-power CPU's I don't think we'd see nearly the improvement in performance we think we might. I don't have the specific CPU that's in our cars but I have a very similar-specced CPU here among my bits and parts that I actually do run Android on for development purposes. It's plenty fast... in fact it still thrashes almost everything else I've played with that runs Android except in very corner use cases. The main difference between my dev board and the one in our cars is actually memory space; mine has 8GB of RAM while I seem to recall the one in our cars has 4. Now, even that shouldn't make a huge difference because while a low memory situation will cause some performance degradation, 4GB of RAM is almost certainly more than enough for the application sets we're running on the cars. And because of the nature of the car systems we're not trying to run 12 different apps at once along with some random game... automotive systems are FAR more focused and if you think it through we're not running more than 3-4 apps at a time.
The only app I've tried to run where a significant slowdown is noticeable is ABRP. However, I suspect that's actually a combination of slow storage and an app that's really not optimized properly for the Intel platform because it was originally targeted for ARM. I have noticed it's getting better with each new release too, so I suspect they're working on it. The storage in our cars again I'm not sure but in these classes of boards is usually eMMC rather than an SSD because it's usually more cost effective. I might be wrong on this but it would seem to make sense. The occasional slowdowns in Google Maps are probably equal parts LTE drops/reconnects and the aforementioned slow storage. Nothing else I've noticed would indicate that the CPU is in any way constrained running the apps we have. In fact the fact that the Vivaldi browser works so well could well be attributed to the car having plenty of horsepower to spare.
I realize most of this is conjecture but I spent MANY years working in embedded systems and know a lot about how these work and also the business decisions behind upgrades and modifications. And besides, this thread is all about conjecture, isn't it?