I found this the other day. Atom??? Could they find a more lame processor?
Err, included under the Atom range is a series with up to 24-cores, 32 PCIe lanes, 16 SATA ports, 100Gbps (yes, that's two zeros) ethernet, and support for 128GiB of RAM. Pretty lame.
Yeah, show me how it compares to nearly any other non-atom processor with similar features other than the atom name. The whole point is the Atom is slow so as to be low power. They rip out a bunch of stuff to reduce the circuitry, so of course it is small allowing you to get 24 of them on a chip. Normally this would be bad as it's hard to design a memory interface to keep up with that many CPUs, but when they are Atoms it's not so tough.
Yes that is something that got released this very month and its designed for servers where you need many slow threads without them eating up huge amounts of power.
The sort of Atom you would find in a 6 year old Tesla infotainment system is not going to be one of those chips. The earlier Atom processors got a really bad reputation due to being used in ultra portable laptops back in the day. These laptops ware really slow compared to all the other ones running more classical x86 chips. So it got a reputation for being slow, and yes it was slow, you wouldn't want an Atom CPU in your daily driver PC. Yet it still did it at impressively low power consumption so in terms of performance/watt its actually pretty good. This combined with having a lot of the peripheral controllers (that would otherwise live in a south bridge) integrated on the chip makes it a good choice as a x86 SOC to integrate into products.
Six year old? This design is older than that I think. Actually my car got an upgrade to something so it may have been this board. It had to do with the full self driving capability, but... that's not quite the same as "infotainment" and I'm pretty sure it isn't running on an Atom.
So its probably a pretty nice fit for an infotainment system. Linux will run just fine on old underpowered hardware and most of the heavy lifting of drawing a pretty UI is likely handled by the integrated GPU anyway.
So if this is such a great processor, why would it be so dogged slow on the browser. I suppose that could actually be the connectivity. It's over the cell network and I'm pretty sure they aren't using 5G.
I'm no fan of Atom because every review I've seen of them indicates there is an ARM that is better, faster, lower power and cheaper. Intel still owns the desktop, but that is fading away and mobile is taking over.
Im still very much against the overall trend in automotive towards big ass touchscreens, but that's a topic for another day-
I'm opposed to touch screens of any size. Cars bounce around making touch screens problematic. I guess if it only supports the "press" of a button and no swipes it can work ok, but the big Tesla screen that you reach at nearly arms length has a tendency to see lots of button presses as swipes and ignore them. Sometimes I have to press a button three, four or five times to take effect. Trying to bump the heater fan up a few notches is a PITA.
The Tesla UI is far, far too complex to be safe. But I didn't say that out loud, did I?