Author Topic: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?  (Read 5728 times)

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Offline MK14

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #25 on: June 02, 2020, 09:51:20 pm »
Why would you say the modern car appeared in the 90s? I'd have said the 30s perhaps, or 50s or early 60s. The 90s feels completely arbitrary as almost all the development back then was iterative.

Well, let's take it stage by stage.
1990 (approx) DOS = NOT windows like.
Early windows = Blocky graphics (in my opinion), and not very good or stable/useful.
So, around Windows95 (roughly 1995), it was somewhat useful/stable and good.

Cars. I took a modern day car, to mean many all around air-bags, computerised engine/auto-box management, lots of electronic/computer bits. Relatively reliable/efficient engine. Etc etc.
Hence 1995. A bit sooner, if you go for very expensive cars, and a bit later, for very cheap ones.
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #26 on: June 02, 2020, 10:06:52 pm »
Well, let's take it stage by stage.
1990 (approx) DOS = NOT windows like.
Early windows = Blocky graphics (in my opinion), and not very good or stable/useful.
So, around Windows95 (roughly 1995), it was somewhat useful/stable and good.

Cars. I took a modern day car, to mean many all around air-bags, computerised engine/auto-box management, lots of electronic/computer bits. Relatively reliable/efficient engine. Etc etc.
Hence 1995. A bit sooner, if you go for very expensive cars, and a bit later, for very cheap ones.
To me picking the 90s feels wholly arbitrary. Historically there are various points at which vehicle design paradigms changed or shifted significantly. The 90s are not one of those points. Car were just refined gradually in that era. That's almost the complete opposite from computer technology which was going through a crazy phase in the 90s. I'm just a bit confused by your pick because it's almost the exact opposite of what I'd have picked or even considered. :P
 

Offline MK14

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #27 on: June 02, 2020, 10:22:31 pm »
To me picking the 90s feels wholly arbitrary. Historically there are various points at which vehicle design paradigms changed or shifted significantly. The 90s are not one of those points. Car were just refined gradually in that era. That's almost the complete opposite from computer technology which was going through a crazy phase in the 90s. I'm just a bit confused by your pick because it's almost the exact opposite of what I'd have picked or even considered. :P

I agree. It is rather Cherry-picked/arbitrary.

A 1960s car, can actually be quite good. But, a 1960s operating system, is not really comparable to Windows 10.
So, you could take a genuinely 1960s restored car, and drive it 500 miles on modern roads, in reasonable speed/convenience and quite enjoy the experience.
Whereas, a 1960s Operating System, Might struggle playing a 4K Graphics game, as it was probably expecting a serial crt text display unit, or even an ASR model 33, 10 characters per second, printing terminal.
Also, if the game is 8GBytes in size, I wonder how long it will take to load, via the ASR33's, 10 char per second (approx), paper tape reader ?
 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #28 on: June 02, 2020, 10:39:50 pm »
90s is arbitrary; Xerox Alto was 70s and already did everything Windows and Mac did (give or take performance, UI design, and most of all, cost!).  And that in turn was influenced by Engelbart's production in the 60s (which, as far as I know, was a one-off and would've been quite expensive to equip, stage and produce, but as you can see, was eminently possible with period technology).

I don't know that there was a comparable breakthrough in ICE design, say; but I am far from an expert on the history.  Perhaps fuel injection would be a similarly foundational step?  But then, that's been done in some capacity since Diesel in the 1890s.  And turbo and superchargers have been around about as long.  It's really just been a slow and tedious, incremental improvement over the years, punctuated by various research steps that succeeded (and numerous others that didn't pan out into production).

It seems more appropriate to compare the fundamental invention of the ICE to the invention of, say, the vacuum tube.  See, thing is this: electronics has benefited from truly exponential growth over the years, while absolutely nothing comparable can be said of the ICE -- the laws of thermodynamics themselves prohibit exponential growth in that space, after all.  Engines can get smaller and denser, absolutely; they can get more reliable; but only incrementally more efficient, up to the limit.

Or likewise for materials science and fabrication, for all the mechanical components in a car -- these are incrementally improved, year by year, but once the major discoveries were made -- lightweight aluminum, high strength alloy steel, etc. -- there is again only so much improvement that is possible.  (Carbon fiber is probably the next biggest improvement in that space, and it has gotten a lot cheaper over the years.)

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Offline 0xdeadbeef

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #29 on: June 02, 2020, 10:44:11 pm »
It seems crazy that modern ECUs would have a 256MB ROM, the ECU in my car has a 4K ROM.
I don't think there is any gasoline/diesel car with an engine control unit with more than a few MB of (flash) ROM. The absolute high end in developman right now and going into production in 2023 or so has around 8MB of flash.
And quite a bit of that is used for one or two dimensional calibration maps (most of the complex calculations are replaced by loop up tables and interpolation due to realtime requirements etc.)
Anyway, 4K seems very low even for a very old car. When I started in the industry >20years ago, the ECUs in development used something like 128k to 512k flash. Why that increased to 2-8MB in the last twenty years is easy to explain: mainly due to regulations regarding exhaust emissions and safety.
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Offline SparkyFX

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #30 on: June 03, 2020, 01:28:40 am »
The problem is in the definition what constitutes an OS and if this is seen from the side of the result or from the side of the process.
If you read about how/under which circumstances the first OS were developed, there was not much hardware resources to work from. Of course a modern car would beat that in complexity several times.

Then there is this: an OS is the compiled result of a process and that result can be copied lossless. To produce a car the processes are a lot more complex to get one copy. The sum of the tooling alone would beat complexity.
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Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #31 on: June 03, 2020, 02:41:08 am »
Modern, 8, 9 and 10 gear automatic transmissions on themselves are so spectacularly complex, that there are only a few companies that can design and build them.
The gearsets in a DCT are surprisingly simple - more or less a pair of manual transmissions with one handling the even gears and the other the odd gears. The complex part is the control system to smoothly switch between the two. Apparently, that's the most common cause of failure in some early DCTs.

Then there are CVTs which can be very simple mechanically, especially Toyota CVTs.
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #32 on: June 03, 2020, 04:21:11 am »
Modern, 8, 9 and 10 gear automatic transmissions on themselves are so spectacularly complex, that there are only a few companies that can design and build them.
The gearsets in a DCT are surprisingly simple - more or less a pair of manual transmissions with one handling the even gears and the other the odd gears. The complex part is the control system to smoothly switch between the two. Apparently, that's the most common cause of failure in some early DCTs.

Then there are CVTs which can be very simple mechanically, especially Toyota CVTs.

CVT is a great example.  They are conceptually extremely simple.  Four cones and a belt.  With infinite gear ratios they are absolutely ideal for matching the power band of an engine to current driving conditions.  At least that is the theory.  The devil is in the details, and the fact that this perfect solution is relatively rarely used in production vehicles indicates that there is some real "complexity" to implementation.

An analogy for the purely electronic among us is a buck configuration switching power supply.  An electronic switch.  It is always either on or off so no power is dissipated in the switch.  And then a simple capacitor to smooth the output.  What could be simpler?  But when it becomes time to actually implement one and get close to that theoretically perfect concept there are a myriad of details to get right.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #33 on: June 03, 2020, 05:14:04 am »
The battery?

Windshield washer pump, light bulbs, a few other things, not a whole lot though.

So far I've never owned a car newer than 1990 and I doubt I'll ever have anything newer than early 2000's unless I just get some beater to get me around at some point. They're all crap now, nothing has piqued my interest in the least, especially now that I hardly ever drive anymore.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #34 on: June 03, 2020, 05:17:53 am »
CVT is a great example.  They are conceptually extremely simple.  Four cones and a belt.  With infinite gear ratios they are absolutely ideal for matching the power band of an engine to current driving conditions.  At least that is the theory.  The devil is in the details, and the fact that this perfect solution is relatively rarely used in production vehicles indicates that there is some real "complexity" to implementation.

An analogy for the purely electronic among us is a buck configuration switching power supply.  An electronic switch.  It is always either on or off so no power is dissipated in the switch.  And then a simple capacitor to smooth the output.  What could be simpler?  But when it becomes time to actually implement one and get close to that theoretically perfect concept there are a myriad of details to get right.

CVTs are shit, my friend has one in some kinds of strange looking thing, Nissan I think. It failed at around 70k miles and cost a fortune to fix. She's not alone either, the forums are full of people having problems with them. Then there is the driving experience, they either feel just plain weird and disconcerting, and sound like something is very wrong when they are working properly, or the computer has been programmed to mimic the discrete shifts like a conventional transmission. It's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but in practice it is garbage, at least it has been in the 3 or 4 cars I've driven that had one.

If I can't get a proper manual gearbox with 3 pedals I'm not buying. This is not negotiable.
 

Offline JPortici

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #35 on: June 03, 2020, 06:11:41 am »
It seems crazy that modern ECUs would have a 256MB ROM, the ECU in my car has a 4K ROM.

Well, this is what you have in mid/higher end cars since about 2017 (Class A, Class C, A4, A6, A7, A8 i think also Series5, Series 7)
https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/landing-page/stellar-32-bit-automotive-mcus.html?icmp=tt10612_gl_pron_feb2019
absolutely crazy.

I don't remember the bosch code for the ECU but it is also CRAZY big with about 250-300 pin connectors. You could see it open at ST's stand 2 years ago at embedded world, i have the photo somewhere..

[OT] I also agree with you on modern cars - in part. I'm 100% happy with my current 2014 skoda octavia. Good engine, manual gear, KNOBS AND BUTTONS instead of a stupid touchscreen. It lacks LED lights -and no approved conversion kit -  :(  and i kind of wish i had an android auto radio but nog going to spend 2k for that

The best balance in electronics in cars was around 2015 IMHO. The only new car i would get today would be (again) a Fiat, Alfa or a Jeep, they are the only ones i still feel like i am the one who's driving. In many other brands i find the elecronics to be too intrusive. And fiat's is the best infotainment IMHO
Maybe i'll change the idea when the all touchscreen fad will go away.. no more than four years i think?[/OT]
« Last Edit: June 03, 2020, 06:26:20 am by JPortici »
 

Offline Rerouter

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #36 on: June 03, 2020, 07:27:34 am »
Trucks and buses tend to have the stupidly large ROM images. As they bake in a lot of optional extras. Including things like blackbox features that have data going back to the last service.
 

Offline MK14

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #37 on: June 03, 2020, 08:51:04 am »
90s is arbitrary; Xerox Alto was 70s
...
...
I don't know that there was a comparable breakthrough in ICE design

The thing is, you seem to be referring to the years, when something was first invented. But first inventing something and/or demoing a (potentially very) simplistic version of it. Is not the same as being able to (economically), go to mass market with it.

E.g. Take the humble transistor.

The original (1947+) ones, were hand-made, (I'm not an expert on Ge transistors, so could easily be mistaken) Germanium (which didn't seem to make the best of transistors), too expensive (1947+), not really mass-produced (in a big way). Relatively unreliable (1947+), subject to significant thermal runaway problems. Not suitable for higher voltages, higher currents were tricky and max power dissipation was not brilliant (1947+).
They also couldn't cope with much temperature, and would exhibit considerable change in parameters, as the temperature changes.
So, many significant inventions in the transistor world, had to occur, such as Silicon, and various improvements to the manufacturability of them. Took place.
Then it took time for new 'transistorised' circuit designs to be made (developed/invented).
Finally, they had to displace (compete with), the existing valve/tube market players.

So, although technically speaking, the transistor was invented around 1947 (even that is not agreed by everyone, as there may have been other, relevant inventions, much earlier).
It took a number of decades, for them to become commonplace.
Perhaps (opinions can vary), from around 1970 (I know there was transistor items, especially radios in the 50s, and the 60s, had a number of transistorised items, hit the market) onwards, in most things. The transistors really took off.

One could perhaps argue, it took the invention of the integrated circuit, to see transistors really succeed.

I.e. As regards the windows like OS. (Xerox Alto etc). I doubt it was ready in that form to hit the mass market. Affordable, reasonably powerful computers needed to be invented (especially cpus, graphics and memory).
Hard/floppy disks needed to be improved, and made cheaper/smaller.
Then the entire windows eco-system, had to be created, along with a number of key software applications.
That would have taken quite some time.

So, yes. In e.g. 70s, you could have seen a DEMO of something windows like. It was NOT a product, that could have been released in e.g. 1971.
1971 = Memory prices HUGE, just for 1K of semiconductor ram (dram I think).
1971 = 4 bit, 100,000 instructions per second, max memory space 4K, Intel 4004 cpu. (I'm sure windows 10 could fit inside 4K of address space, with a tiny bit of optimisation. N.B. I'm never sarcastic).
1971 = Looking at Mainframe, higher capacity (but still small by today's standards), hard disks. They were huge items, the size of washing machines. Presumably cost millions of dollars. I.e. not really ready to hit the mass market.

tl;dr
Post getting too long. Although 90s is arbitrary, it probably wasn't viable for it to be that much sooner, than it was. E.g. 1971, as shown above. As the stuff wasn't available then and/or was too expensive for the mass market.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2020, 08:56:08 am by MK14 »
 

Offline newbrain

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #38 on: June 03, 2020, 02:10:43 pm »
from a long time ago

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.

13. You would press the ‘start’ button to shut off the engine.
About point 1:
999672-0
In the meantime, I had 2 car failures.

About 13: that's exactly what I do on my car (and have been doing for 15 years...).
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #39 on: June 03, 2020, 02:39:47 pm »
from a long time ago

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.

13. You would press the ‘start’ button to shut off the engine.

About 13: that's exactly what I do on my car (and have been doing for 15 years...).

Well, on mine too.
And on cars that don't have Start/stop buttons, but just an ignition key, starting and stopping the engine is also done actioning the same key. What's the problem?
Oh, and most ON/OFF buttons on most devices also combine switching it on and... off.

I've always found this one "argument" (very popular silly nitpick about the Windows Start button for like ever) completely off. The Start "button" in Windows gave access to the "Start" menu - from which you could pretty much control the whole computer, including switching it off. It's a rather consistent approach. The "start" button in Windows was never meant to "start" the computer itself anyway (how could it), but to act as a "starting point" for most tasks. Anyway.

 
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Offline capacitor_explosion

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #40 on: June 03, 2020, 04:20:39 pm »
As far as im aware the modern car the software is +1-100 milion lines of code . Even on low-end to mid-end cars have 20+ ECUs working and comunicating at the same time.  The number of ECUs is growing all the time: not only because of safety and emissions reduction but, lately, because of the need of the car to be "connected". But that comes with a cost  more lines of code = more bugs and problems down the road .
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Offline james_s

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #41 on: June 03, 2020, 06:29:59 pm »
[OT] I also agree with you on modern cars - in part. I'm 100% happy with my current 2014 skoda octavia. Good engine, manual gear, KNOBS AND BUTTONS instead of a stupid touchscreen. It lacks LED lights -and no approved conversion kit -  :(  and i kind of wish i had an android auto radio but nog going to spend 2k for that

The best balance in electronics in cars was around 2015 IMHO. The only new car i would get today would be (again) a Fiat, Alfa or a Jeep, they are the only ones i still feel like i am the one who's driving. In many other brands i find the elecronics to be too intrusive. And fiat's is the best infotainment IMHO
Maybe i'll change the idea when the all touchscreen fad will go away.. no more than four years i think?[/OT]

My friend has a Skoda Octavia, 2009 I think, TDI engine, he's been pretty happy with it. In recent years though he's had an issue where it will crank but won't start after it's been driven. For example it'll fire up just fine at home, then he drives to the store to buy groceries and it won't start.

I think mid 90s-early 2000's was kind of the golden era in many ways. Cars by then had all the creature comforts I care about but hadn't started to get bloated and they still largely had real buttons and switches. They had started to transition from nice clean lines to weird rounded bubbly shapes both inside and out though and I still much prefer straight lines, clean angles and a more industrial design. My favorite examples are aircraft, they don't follow silly styling fads and are almost purely form over function. The cockpit in a modern airliner looks a lot like the cockpit in a 1950s airliner aside from analog gauges being replaced by "glass cockpit" digital representations. The layout and overall design are mature, the problem was solved decades ago and they don't keep making arbitrary changes just to make it look new.
 

Offline Fredderic

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #42 on: June 04, 2020, 02:41:35 am »
I've always found this one "argument" (very popular silly nitpick about the Windows Start button for like ever) completely off. The Start "button" in Windows gave access to the "Start" menu - from which you could pretty much control the whole computer, including switching it off. It's a rather consistent approach. The "start" button in Windows was never meant to "start" the computer itself anyway (how could it), but to act as a "starting point" for most tasks. Anyway.

The start button in Windows for shutting off the computer, is a little different though.

It's a little more obvious in Linux, where you shut down the computer by running the "shutdown" command (or one of it's variants) on a commandline (and I'm pretty certain the GUIs still do it by invoking those same commands — Linux likes that, because it lets you substitute a different command/system/whatever to suit your needs).  But Windows is essentially the same.  You are, in fact, "starting" the process that orchestrates the system shutdown on your behalf.

Also, I'm pretty sure I recall way back when the Windows start button was first introduced, it was specifically being presented as the "starting point" for doing things with your system.  But yeah, in pretty much all the major OS's, you are quite literally starting the shutting down of the system.

I'm not sure the same can really be said for cars…  Yet.  Although computer-on-wheels models like Tesla, quite possibly…  Assuming they do still even actually shut off at all…  "Starting the engine" for an all electric vehicle, seems like a dubious proposition to begin with.
 

Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #43 on: June 04, 2020, 03:59:45 am »
CVT is a great example.  They are conceptually extremely simple.  Four cones and a belt.  With infinite gear ratios they are absolutely ideal for matching the power band of an engine to current driving conditions.  At least that is the theory.  The devil is in the details, and the fact that this perfect solution is relatively rarely used in production vehicles indicates that there is some real "complexity" to implementation.

An analogy for the purely electronic among us is a buck configuration switching power supply.  An electronic switch.  It is always either on or off so no power is dissipated in the switch.  And then a simple capacitor to smooth the output.  What could be simpler?  But when it becomes time to actually implement one and get close to that theoretically perfect concept there are a myriad of details to get right.

CVTs are shit, my friend has one in some kinds of strange looking thing, Nissan I think. It failed at around 70k miles and cost a fortune to fix. She's not alone either, the forums are full of people having problems with them. Then there is the driving experience, they either feel just plain weird and disconcerting, and sound like something is very wrong when they are working properly, or the computer has been programmed to mimic the discrete shifts like a conventional transmission. It's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but in practice it is garbage, at least it has been in the 3 or 4 cars I've driven that had one.
Toyota has a simpler, more reliable design for a CVT based around a planetary gearset and two motors. The complexity is in the electronics - looking at a control board for one of those, there are two ASICs with a 4MB SPI ROM next to one of them, two motor control ADCs, and the remainder of the board are various logic power supplies and CAN bus transceivers. Funny thing is, I bought the whole assembly for cheap so I could convert the motor inverters into a solar inverter, which involves replacing the control board with a FPGA. I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough flexibility built into the ASICs to theoretically allow them to be reprogrammed to do exactly what I want, but the intentional lack of documentation would make that a lot more difficult than just putting in a FPGA.
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Offline Neilm

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Re: Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
« Reply #44 on: June 05, 2020, 05:45:36 pm »
I drive a Tesla, so I can't tell the difference between the two
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