Ars Technica reviews the P85D

[vvanders]

Sorry, but how can you state definitievely that the Tegra3 is "severely underpowered" when you have no data to support that statement other than what you see on screen.
I would contend that the majority of lagginess is either due in part to 3G connectivity and/or a some dependencies/multithreading in the software that remain to be ironed out.

Lets say you put a processor in that is twice as powerful, your one second delay becomes 0.5sec and is obviously still laggy albeit slightly less so.

As an example, some versions of Android are noticeably more laggy than others in some parts of the software, yet my N5 processor remains unchanged.

It's very much the case of the Tegra3 being underpowered. Benchmarks aren't always the best metric as each piece of software behaves differently but look at these two devices which have identical hardware, aside from one using a Tegra3 for non-US markets and the other using a Qualcomm 8960 for US:

HTC One X (Tegra 3) Review - Performance
HTC One X (MSM8960) Review - Performance

Tegra3 clocks in at 3540 vs QC's 6131 on IceStorm, when driving a large panel like on the Model S having enough GPU oomph is going to make a large difference in the fluidity of your software.

That said Telsa has done a pretty good job of wirnging performance out of the chip and I don't have any major complaints although it is disappointing to see hitches in parts of the experience.

 

[Cyclone]

Sometimes, yes. I can also get it to freeze -- like 10+ seconds of no response -- when Slacker wigs out.

Omg this is happening to me daily, sometimes multiple times a day. It's the number one annoying thing I am encountering! Sad to hear it's not a part issue that my service center can fix.

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I think a lot of folks perceive lag of screen/CPU when it is really lag due to 3g/network.

3G latency shouldn't affect the trunk release controls though (as people earlier in the thread have experienced lag).

Exactly! I've had the reverse camera refuse to turn on, been unable to get into controls to change the suspension, unable to change the temp on the a/c, etc. The common element in everything, Slacker was changing songs. All of these then came back to life about 7-10 seconds later as Slacker displayed the next song.

 

[Korben]

Sounds like slacker needs to be niced. Really the whole media experience could use some work.

Problem is that Linux is not a RTOS so you have to be really careful with process management.

All idle speculation of course. If they would just give me root...

---edited for cell phone grammar---

 

[stopcrazypp]

Isn't the code base already split though? Some Model S have autopilot hardware, while others do not.

I'd be surprised if Tesla was pushing the same firmware to both new and legacy vehicles.

I'm pretty sure they can handle that with some modularity. But switching to a new chip means having to compile something different for the new chip (while you don't necessarily have to compile separate executables for different car hardware configurations like autopilot), and some APIs might changed or be eliminated. It's not impossible to keep the same codebase for different chipsets (esp. if they are very similar and one is a direct descendant of the other), but there typically will be changes among the different generations that make it hard to do this (esp. if you want to use the new chipset to its full potential).

 

[thegruf]

It's very much the case of the Tegra3 being underpowered. Benchmarks aren't always the best metric as each piece of software behaves differently but look at these two devices which have identical hardware, aside from one using a Tegra3 for non-US markets and the other using a Qualcomm 8960 for US:

HTC One X (Tegra 3) Review - Performance
HTC One X (MSM8960) Review - Performance

Tegra3 clocks in at 3540 vs QC's 6131 on IceStorm, when driving a large panel like on the Model S having enough GPU oomph is going to make a large difference in the fluidity of your software.

That said Telsa has done a pretty good job of wirnging performance out of the chip and I don't have any major complaints although it is disappointing to see hitches in parts of the experience.

Thankyou for proving my point exactly

- yes there are more powerful processors than the Tegra 3, however lagginess is more to do with software structure than outright processor speed.

The Icestorm figures you quote are 3D game graphics - hardly relevant to the Model S.
In fact the Tegra3 betters the MSM8960 in the "Android Work" benchmark which is more likely relevant.

As for screen size - well pixel count on a decent smartphone is probably higher than the Model S screen which has lower ppi resolution so that doesn't really hold out either.
And I will say again that, unless you have access to data I don't, we have no idea how hard the Tegra processor is working in the Tesla so it is not reasonable accuse it of being underpowered.

Give Tesla a few minor builds and hopefully they'll get on top of lagginess.

 

[Footbag]

Hope they will provide the option of upgrading the cpu after model x has shipped with the supposed next gen one. It would be a nice upgrade of one of the few parts of the original design that does not feel to have aged as nicely.

Seems hit or miss whether people find it laggy. I have been noticing it more so as of late. Perhaps the newness excitement is starting to wane and things like this are no longer getting subconsciously overlooked, I don't know.
At any rate, my question to everyone is, how much would you pay (lets just assume for a moment Tesla won't do it for free) to have them upgrade the CPU? $100? $500? $1000+? And what is your reasoning for whatever price you set?
I'd consider it for under $500, with some commitment that upgrading it would allow additional features (like what, I don't know) that would not be available to non upgraded cars (and of course which doesn't rely on other hardware that may not be present).
If they were going to charge any amount, but there wasn't any additional features added, just faster response, i'd pass.

 

[wk057]

Every update I've received over the past year has progressively made the UI more and more laggy. The P85D (w/autopilot hardware) is noticeably more laggy than my fiance's P85 (pre-autopilot) on the same firmware version.

This is definitely something they're going to need to address, but I think there are more important priorities right now. Long term, though, this will definitely need to be fixed. Not everyone has the patience for the lag.

 

[vvanders]

Thankyou for proving my point exactly

- yes there are more powerful processors than the Tegra 3, however lagginess is more to do with software structure than outright processor speed.

The Icestorm figures you quote are 3D game graphics - hardly relevant to the Model S.
In fact the Tegra3 betters the MSM8960 in the "Android Work" benchmark which is more likely relevant.

As for screen size - well pixel count on a decent smartphone is probably higher than the Model S screen which has lower ppi resolution so that doesn't really hold out either.
And I will say again that, unless you have access to data I don't, we have no idea how hard the Tegra processor is working in the Tesla so it is not reasonable accuse it of being underpowered.

Give Tesla a few minor builds and hopefully they'll get on top of lagginess.

I'll let you in on a little secret. No one uses the CPU to do rendering any more, they all dispatch to the GPU in order to deal with the incredible fill rate requirements. Android started doing it around the qHD resolution(960x540) because the SoCs couldn't keep up with the pixel count. Screen resolution on the main panel is 1920x1200(Tesla Model S teardown | ZDNet) which is 138.2 Gpx/sec at 60FPS. There's no way a quad core 1.4Ghz can even hope to fill that at 30 FPS(69.1 Gpx/sec) much less at 60.

As far as Android Work, that's a pretty poor benchmark. FutureMark isn't the best at CPU qualification. Anandtech has a much better breakdown with the 8960 and Tegra3 here: The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Preview Part II which has the Krait beating the 4+1 Tegra cores by a factor of 2x in some benchmarks and beating it in but one fixed benchmark(which can be easily gamed).

There's a lot more that I could get into here but trust me when I tell you the Tegra3 is underpowered.

Like I said earlier I have to commend Tesla on getting as much performance out of the Tegra3 as they did. From their job postings it looks like the use a custom C++ based UI renderer which is what you need to do if you want to extract every last ounce out of a SoC.

 

[Cyclone]

Something tells me that part of the 7.0 redesigned UI will be to address UI responsiveness. At least, I hope it will!

 

[EarlyAdopter]

The 2013 Nexus 7 tablet has a Tegra 3 SoC and a 1920x1200 screen, exact same hardware as the Model S center console. It's a very responsive tablet. The hardware is up to the task. The lag is a software problem.

 

[supratachophobia]

The 2013 Nexus 7 tablet has a Tegra 3 SoC and a 1920x1200 screen, exact same hardware as the Model S center console. It's a very responsive tablet. The hardware is up to the task. The lag is a software problem.

It does Not. The 2013 nexus7 is the same spec as the nexus5, snapdragon process.

 

[wk057]

I've been hoping to get my hands on a center console unit to begin the reverse engineering process... any leads?

 

[supratachophobia]

I tend to agree with several comments. Considering the price points I think we should have both an upgraded chipset (installed free to all owners) and 4G. That should be able to cure many latency problems which clearly grow more irritating as capabilities go up. I also would not mind paying a little for the hardware upgrades; that doesn't mean I'll like that but I would put up with it.

Frankly, the slow responses to everything from media selection to frunk/trunk/charge management and internet access are all subpar for 2015. Methinks many of our quibbles could be eliminated or reduced by improved graphics processing speed and better internet access.

I would pay for this immediately of it came in the form of included in the yearly service.

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Sorry, but how can you state definitievely that the Tegra3 is "severely underpowered" when you have no data to support that statement other than what you see on screen.
I would contend that the majority of lagginess is either due in part to 3G connectivity and/or a some dependencies/multithreading in the software that remain to be ironed out.

Lets say you put a processor in that is twice as powerful, your one second delay becomes 0.5sec and is obviously still laggy albeit slightly less so.

As an example, some versions of Android are noticeably more laggy than others in some parts of the software, yet my N5 processor remains unchanged.

Coming from android phones that have the latest and greatest tegra/atom/snapdragon chips six years in a row, I know a laggy interface when I see/experiance one.

 

[vvanders]

The 2013 Nexus 7 tablet has a Tegra 3 SoC and a 1920x1200 screen, exact same hardware as the Model S center console. It's a very responsive tablet. The hardware is up to the task. The lag is a software problem.

That's actually the 2012 version with a 1280x800 display, the 2013 has the QC 8064 and 1920x1200 .

 

[EarlyAdopter]

That's actually the 2012 version with a 1280x800 display, the 2013 has the QC 8064 and 1920x1200 .

I stand corrected. The 2012 N7 is laggy. The hardware in the Model S is crap then indeed. Remarkable they've been able to squeeze what they have out of it.

 

[andrewket]

My guess the lag is software based. Some process in the background is consuming too many resources (maybe the process that is supposedly constantly checking to see if you're about to drive off the electric grid?). When slacker or something else gets hung up the entire UI suffers.

 

[supratachophobia]

My guess the lag is software based. Some process in the background is consuming too many resources (maybe the process that is supposedly constantly checking to see if you're about to drive off the electric grid?). When slacker or something else gets hung up the entire UI suffers.

I will say that I experience crappy performance on the touch screen 90 precent of the time. I define crappy as laggy, initially not responsive touch presses (1-2sec delay). I nearly always have a list of music playing from USB and it's almost always a couple thousand tracks. I don't know if the two are related in anyway but even without music queued, the Nav screen doing a trip calculation takes upwards 30-45sec before it finds a route (on WiFi, put your pitchforks away).

For those that say it's a software problem, I doubt the tesla engineers could have done that bad of a job in messy programming on purpose. Graphics aside, my 15 year old Empeg was/is instantaneous at navigating 30k total songs, with playlists hitting 5k, with randomizing, with equalizer profiles, with on the fly playlist additions, and all with a 266mhz processor and 16mb of RAM, and IDE 4200 rpm laptop hard drives. It had no where near the graphics processing power of a tegra3. That tells me that media *should not* be the anchor keeping the interface bogged down. It has to be more a problem with 1920x1080 graphics @ 60fps.

 

[brianman]

I think a lot of folks perceive lag of screen/CPU when it is really lag due to 3g/network.

Network lag doesn't explain it taking 5+ seconds to display "Controls". It happens at least 20 times a year for me.

 

[Cyclone]

Network lag doesn't explain it taking 5+ seconds to display "Controls". It happens at least 20 times a year for me.

Which of course leads to thinking you missed the button, pressing again, then waiting to respond, and seeing it quickly flash on and the back off because the UI has caught up. This occurs daily.

 

[LetsGoFast]

One area where the lag is especially noticeable is when you hit the "controls" button. Sometimes the delay is so bad I conclude that I missed the button and press it again. This causes the controls window to disappear immediately when it eventually pops up.