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Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech produc

by tw04 10y ago

Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that.

phkahler 10y ago
>> Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. I completely agree. >> Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that. But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use.
- samfisher83 10y ago
  Why do we still have this misnomer. The front end which decodes the x86 instructions is a small part of the overall chip. Intel made low power chips that were on phones using x86. They just had no competitive advantage in that space and left.
- baq 10y ago
  > But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. it isn't a power or efficiency problem. it's a margin problem. vehicle electronics have margins that consumer devices don't. just look at the price of 95% useless in-car satnav.
- gchadwick 10y ago
  > But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. When you're running a electric motor that pulls power on the magnitude of 1 * 10^5 W (i.e. 100 kW+) I doubt you care about a few extra watts total power load if you have an inefficient processor. Similarly for conventional fuel, an extra few watts on the load is hardly going to worry the alternator.
  - phkahler 10y ago
    OK. I've worked on several EVs with 100kW motors. Lets do some math. A really good EV takes around 200 to 250 watt-hours per mile. On the EPA urban drive cycle you average just under 20 miles per hour. If you have 100 miles range, that will take around 5 hours in urban driving. A 40 watt load for 5 hours is 200 watt-hours. Your Intel processor running near 100 watts is going to cost you 2.5 percent of the range. Or if you look at costs, it's going to take that percentage of the battery cost to run it. Sure an EV can suck 100kW or more of power, but only for a short time. And it can be put back into the battery via regenerative baking. Range is incredibly sensitive to electrical loads.
    - Symmetry 10y ago
      The power used by a processor is mostly a matter of performance rather than ISA. You might be able to make a non-x86 processor with similar performance that only takes 95 rather than 100 Watts but that's the extent of it. The reason that ARM processors are able to take so much less power than Intel is because their single threaded performance is much lower. As single threaded performance increases linearly the power required goes up as the square of that for architectural improvements and as the cube for frequency improvements modulo FO4 delays. Intel's Atom processors haven't gotten huge amounts of love from the parent company but for DSPish code of the sort that cars are mostly running they should perform comparably to the equivalent ARM options.
    - tw04 10y ago
      You're stuck in the mindset that the consumer CPUs that you can purchase are the only ones Intel can make. They can and do make custom chips, extremely custom, for large customers and government agencies. It would be very, very easy for them to mass produce a chip that drops all the unnecessary features for an "appliance" like self-driving cars.
    - cmurphycode 10y ago
      Let's look at it a different way. The MacBook battery is 55 watt-hours, the Tesla battery is 100 thousand watt hours. They both run their respective workloads for a similar amount of time. So, less than a tenth of a percent?
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  X86 has some inherent disadvantages to arm and other newer risc architectures. The main one being that modern x86 is actually a risc architecture with a x86 to risc conversion layer. Pure risc architectures like arm do not pay this tax. There are other reasons as well. For example, the lack of many registers in the isa exacerbates the register renaming cost. Jim Keller estimates that fully developed arm chips would be ~15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.

by tw04 10y ago

phkahler 10y ago

>> Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. I completely agree. >> Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that. But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use.

samfisher83 10y ago
Why do we still have this misnomer. The front end which decodes the x86 instructions is a small part of the overall chip. Intel made low power chips that were on phones using x86. They just had no competitive advantage in that space and left.
baq 10y ago
> But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. it isn't a power or efficiency problem. it's a margin problem. vehicle electronics have margins that consumer devices don't. just look at the price of 95% useless in-car satnav.
gchadwick 10y ago
> But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. When you're running a electric motor that pulls power on the magnitude of 1 * 10^5 W (i.e. 100 kW+) I doubt you care about a few extra watts total power load if you have an inefficient processor. Similarly for conventional fuel, an extra few watts on the load is hardly going to worry the alternator.
- phkahler 10y ago
  OK. I've worked on several EVs with 100kW motors. Lets do some math. A really good EV takes around 200 to 250 watt-hours per mile. On the EPA urban drive cycle you average just under 20 miles per hour. If you have 100 miles range, that will take around 5 hours in urban driving. A 40 watt load for 5 hours is 200 watt-hours. Your Intel processor running near 100 watts is going to cost you 2.5 percent of the range. Or if you look at costs, it's going to take that percentage of the battery cost to run it. Sure an EV can suck 100kW or more of power, but only for a short time. And it can be put back into the battery via regenerative baking. Range is incredibly sensitive to electrical loads.
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    The power used by a processor is mostly a matter of performance rather than ISA. You might be able to make a non-x86 processor with similar performance that only takes 95 rather than 100 Watts but that's the extent of it. The reason that ARM processors are able to take so much less power than Intel is because their single threaded performance is much lower. As single threaded performance increases linearly the power required goes up as the square of that for architectural improvements and as the cube for frequency improvements modulo FO4 delays. Intel's Atom processors haven't gotten huge amounts of love from the parent company but for DSPish code of the sort that cars are mostly running they should perform comparably to the equivalent ARM options.
  - tw04 10y ago
    You're stuck in the mindset that the consumer CPUs that you can purchase are the only ones Intel can make. They can and do make custom chips, extremely custom, for large customers and government agencies. It would be very, very easy for them to mass produce a chip that drops all the unnecessary features for an "appliance" like self-driving cars.
  - cmurphycode 10y ago
    Let's look at it a different way. The MacBook battery is 55 watt-hours, the Tesla battery is 100 thousand watt hours. They both run their respective workloads for a similar amount of time. So, less than a tenth of a percent?
deepnotderp 10y ago
X86 has some inherent disadvantages to arm and other newer risc architectures. The main one being that modern x86 is actually a risc architecture with a x86 to risc conversion layer. Pure risc architectures like arm do not pay this tax. There are other reasons as well. For example, the lack of many registers in the isa exacerbates the register renaming cost. Jim Keller estimates that fully developed arm chips would be ~15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.