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Incompetence and fear - long term effects vol.1

: money, September 26 2021

Couple of days ago I stumbled on an incredible article in the "Fortune" magazine, called Chipmakers to carmakers: Time to get out of the semiconductor Stone Age. Going with the flow, current one is not in the tech-section for obvious reasons - this is not an engineering problem. It is not even a money-related one. It is the pure incompetence, narrow mindedness and fear of the mid- and high-management that led to it.

Dozens of chips found in everything from electronic brake systems to airbag control units tend to rely on obsolete technology often well over a decade old. These employ comparatively simple transistors that can be anywhere from 45 nanometers to as much as 90 nanometers in size
For decades, ... yes decades, car manufacturers refuse to adapt their way of vehicle production to the new realities and use ancient electronics with the excuse of "reliability". When COVID struck, the sales plummeted sharp and the chip factories switched their production to a more modern ones. Now (and since late 2020), the VW/BMW/Daimler alike scream in pain
“Because of a 50-cent chip, we are unable to build a car that sells for $50000” said Murat Aksel, head of procurement for Volkswagen Group
Dear car industry ladies and gentlemen - this is bull shit!

1. Who let this happen?
Your own managers. Look at them! Did anyone dare to relay the information to the board, that the company is using obsolete tech and millions would be needed to replace or restructure the lines? No. And this was the job of your managers. They hid this, fearing messenger will be shot and lose the quarterly bonus. Do you think engineers did not try, on numerous times, to raise the question? Oh, you think not? Well guess who hid this too. Now you suffer losses because of them. Would you cut their bonuses or fire them? (Unlikely, so nothing will change - meaning it is all your own fault. Now and for the future.) Imagine someone, who just graduated, and due to some incredible luck (connections), landed as a mid-level manager or another person, who worked his whole life to go up the ladder to the higher management. How do you think such person would tell the ones above "we are doing it wrong and we need to change fast". His professional career will end in the blink of an eye. Or, in case of incompetence, he/she is just not getting it. I can say this fairly straight and with certainty, seeing what goes on in the IT industry for the past 2 decades. I have observed this fearful behavior so many times, I don't even get mad anymore.

2. Why this change is so difficult.
It is not just replacing one medieval transistor with a modern one. It is draining the whole swamp and making a nice lake on its place. As the article properly mentions:
“The new technologies are not pin-to-pin compatible, it’s not plug and play,” Salvatori (president of Qualcomm Europe) said. “You have to redesign the circuit, build a new board that might have to be recertified; maybe there’s some impact on the mechanical side that then could affect the car’s chassis.

3. How to overcome this?
By some vague statistic, modern cars use between 300 and 1500 "chip" elements. This is really a mind-boggling number! As a person who knows what he is talking about, when it comes to processor power I can guarantee you, with 100% certainty, that in any existing car, in this very moment, there is no such computational load, that can overburden a process from mid-2000s. The first Xeon (64bit Core microarchitecture), codename "Woodcrest", 65nm, came out in 2006. This is considered also "ancient" nowadays (also discontinued by Intel), but incredibly advanced, compared to what is used in the cars. There is nothing, and I repeat, NOTHING, this baby cannot handle, even the dubious "autonomous driving features". I am not talking about the multimedia - there is a special part about this, just below. I am sure, in this moment someone will jump with the usual "what about reliability". Well - use 2 CPUs, hell, use 4! In different areas of the car. With a proper software any level of redundancy can be achieved. Plus you will have just a few points of failure. Not 1000. Another will jump with the "but the price of such CPUs will be times-higher than what we currently pay". Really? A quick search for Intel Xeon 5110 1.6 GHz shows 4.05Euro. Let's calculate the very optimistic 0.5Euro/per/chip * 1000chips = 500Euro. I am not saying they should replace all of them, but a drastic ~90% reduction should definitely be possible. For comparison - most of the modern CPUs have 14nm (and lower) lithography and are hundreds of times more powerful than the example I gave. Third will come with "but these cannot work in extreme conditions". Well that's the point - they will not have to. Use standardized sensors, not micro-controllers or chips. Will you tell me there are no such sensors? I mean WW2 tech, not something that cost hundreds of dollars. I said also "a proper software" - this is crucial. Going the cheapest way possible (...heavy "Boeing"-coughing) is hardly the way.
“I’ll make them as many Intel 16 [nanometer] chips as they want,” Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger

4. Car multimedia rip-off
Critical vehicle computations and the multimedia part should be separate systems. This is clear as daylight. So the point of "this old CPUs cannot handle someone watching Netflix on the car-screen" is nonsense. Going to the multimedia-scam part - just open any car-configurator and check how much they will charge you for the tablet-thing that shows map data and plays music. $2000, eeh? Car manufacturers, for more than a decade, are selling us the 200-dollars-maximum-tablet (calling it multimedia-navigation-entertainment system), with at least 1000% profit margin. Because F-you, that's why. What would you do? Go somewhere else? There is no excuse when you charge $50K+ for an average-consumer vehicle.
To wrap it up - neither chips cost that much, nor they should have such great impact over the cost of a car. It is all a cartel-like customer treatment, wrong management decisions and greed.