Apple and Sony Cell chip alliance predicted
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Sage said:
Nope. No need for so much calculating power and an order of magnitude more expensive than the chips used currently. Maybe in a couple of years.
Mostly it's still lowly ST10 C16x and some 8-bit Motorola and NEC CPU's which cost less than $1 in large quantities, with not more than 128, maybe 256 KB flash memory which at some point get declared as bug-free and get exchanged for ROM-mask.
Maybe it'll be useful for telematics/entertainment, though.
_xxx_ said:
hmm well i was just thinking about how so many different parts of the car have to communicate with each other all together to arrive at a single descision that the general architecture might be useful. Of course, you don't need the power of a PS3. But maybe "single-cell" chips? And since when did high-end bavarian auto-makers think "we don't need..." rather than "what could we do with..."? I'm thinking it may be useful for wireless car-to-car communication.
It's more like "what are the minimum specs which can enable us do this and that" and "what's the cheapest HW with such specs". Then, the suppliers have real wars - sometimes even offering stuff with huge loss in order to get into the deal.
The centralized architecture is not good for safety reasons. If you had only one powerful control unit it would be deadly if it fails, despite the redundancy. A simple thing like torn power supply cable would shut down all systems and potentially kill all people inside the car (let's say while driving 250 kmh on the highway). The decentralized architecture is a must, I even think it's enforced by some laws.
So you _won't_ put the control of brakes, transmission and motor in one ECU, at least not with the current state of things. But I could imagine the whole entertainment and comfort thingies in one ECU, since these are not safety relevant. Current development for the generation after the next goes in the direction of making all ECU's essentialy the same, while only certain specific functions are enabled. In case of the failure of one unit, the other one could enable those functions and take over. All major manufacturers are just working on the common OS and interfaces (Google for AUTOSAR) which would make some things easier, but it's still years away till they agree on the final specs and actually start some serious work.
And Mercedes isn't bavarian, it's swabian
The centralized architecture is not good for safety reasons. If you had only one powerful control unit it would be deadly if it fails, despite the redundancy. A simple thing like torn power supply cable would shut down all systems and potentially kill all people inside the car (let's say while driving 250 kmh on the highway). The decentralized architecture is a must, I even think it's enforced by some laws.
So you _won't_ put the control of brakes, transmission and motor in one ECU, at least not with the current state of things. But I could imagine the whole entertainment and comfort thingies in one ECU, since these are not safety relevant. Current development for the generation after the next goes in the direction of making all ECU's essentialy the same, while only certain specific functions are enabled. In case of the failure of one unit, the other one could enable those functions and take over. All major manufacturers are just working on the common OS and interfaces (Google for AUTOSAR) which would make some things easier, but it's still years away till they agree on the final specs and actually start some serious work.
And Mercedes isn't bavarian, it's swabian
actually, I wasn't talking about it all being in one device. I was thinking about how cell is optimised for large arrays of processors working together. Or, at least, that's my understanding of it. And since, like you said, modern cars need many independant processors, I thought that cell might be a good application. It would also make the entire system very redundant by default. Of course, I wouldnt expect it to be used in the next generation but maybe two or three generations down the road.
and us Americans think that bavarian = VW / Audi / BMW / M-B and anything else German. Hey, what do you expect from the country that thinks it covers over half the globe?
and us Americans think that bavarian = VW / Audi / BMW / M-B and anything else German. Hey, what do you expect from the country that thinks it covers over half the globe?
I don't know if Cell in its current form or anything resembling it is going to fit too well as a microcontroller in an engine block.
It's not hardened to operate at high temps reliably. Most chips that are designed for this are manufactured at a much wider geometry, like .25 microns to handle the environment while working at something like 30 MHz. Cell at that geometry would be huge, and 30 MHz is an absolute waste.
Compared to the miserly power requirements of embedded controllers, even a single SPU is a major hog.
Then there's the memory and IO interfaces, which don't strike me as being appropriate for the environment.
It's not hardened to operate at high temps reliably. Most chips that are designed for this are manufactured at a much wider geometry, like .25 microns to handle the environment while working at something like 30 MHz. Cell at that geometry would be huge, and 30 MHz is an absolute waste.
Compared to the miserly power requirements of embedded controllers, even a single SPU is a major hog.
Then there's the memory and IO interfaces, which don't strike me as being appropriate for the environment.
Sage said:actually, I wasn't talking about it all being in one device. I was thinking about how cell is optimised for large arrays of processors working together. Or, at least, that's my understanding of it. And since, like you said, modern cars need many independant processors, I thought that cell might be a good application. It would also make the entire system very redundant by default. Of course, I wouldnt expect it to be used in the next generation but maybe two or three generations down the road.
and us Americans think that bavarian = VW / Audi / BMW / M-B and anything else German. Hey, what do you expect from the country that thinks it covers over half the globe?
I misunderstood you than...but still there would be problems. currently, the ECU's communicate through CAN-bus. In the future it'll be FlexRay or TTP. All these ECU's have to have it in HW, and cell definitely doesn't, so that's what would kill it in the first place. And further down the road, who the hell knows...
BMW and Audi are bavarian, VW is westfalian and DC and Porsche are swabian, FYI.
3dilettante said:
It's not just the power. While the car runs, it has more than enough power to power many more stuff. It's more about the standby/power saving modes which are controlled through a global network management via CAN. There are special SW-librarys for that which must be integrated into every device.
Some ST10 80C167 run @40 MHz in current cars, as well as some MPC555 or 68xx @50-60 MHz. But they imediately go into some power save mode as soon as the engine is not running. When the battery is low, some devices get turned off in 2 or 3 stages etc. Mucho stuff to talk about, but I won't annoy you with that.
Temperature is not a huge problem, it rarely exceeds 100°C where the ECU's are and most stock CPU's have no probs with that. Those which work @140°C are not much more expensive, since the quantities are more in the range of millions when DC or BMW go shopping
Lob that into the mix: Apple to buy TiVo?
Now, this is where there is likely to be a very good fit for Cell outside of PS3 - a Cell based Apple Media Center sytle box, marketed as the ideal media companion to ipod?
Now, this is where there is likely to be a very good fit for Cell outside of PS3 - a Cell based Apple Media Center sytle box, marketed as the ideal media companion to ipod?
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