Older Tesla Vehicles To Get UI Performance Boost Thanks To Famed Video Game Engineer (electrek.co) 86
Tesla is working with famed video game engineer John Carmack to improve the interface performance in older vehicles. Electrek reports: Carmack is a legend in the video game world and in the broader computer science industry. He made important advancements in 3D computer graphics and was the lead programmer on game-changing video games like Doom and Quake. Later in his career, he focused his talents on virtual reality and became CTO of Oculus. More recently, he stepped down from his role at Oculus to focus on general artificial intelligence. In the 2000s, Carmack also had an interest in rocketry and started Armadillo Aerospace.
Several of these interests overlap with Elon Musk's, who has a lot of respect for Carmack and tried to hire him for a long time. While it doesn't sound like Musk has convinced him to come work with him just yet, Carmack confirmed that he is actually working on a Tesla product. Carmack drives a Tesla Model S, and he confirmed that he is working with Tesla engineers to improve interface performance: "I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me." Tesla has had performance issues with its older media control unit found in older Tesla Model S vehicles. The automaker offers a media computer upgrade to improve performance, but you are stuck if you don't want to pay the $2,500 upgrade.
Several of these interests overlap with Elon Musk's, who has a lot of respect for Carmack and tried to hire him for a long time. While it doesn't sound like Musk has convinced him to come work with him just yet, Carmack confirmed that he is actually working on a Tesla product. Carmack drives a Tesla Model S, and he confirmed that he is working with Tesla engineers to improve interface performance: "I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me." Tesla has had performance issues with its older media control unit found in older Tesla Model S vehicles. The automaker offers a media computer upgrade to improve performance, but you are stuck if you don't want to pay the $2,500 upgrade.
He does make some wrong bets from time to time.. (Score:2)
Such as supporting the Rendition Vérité cards
But when he get it right, he gets it quite right.
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It wasn't a bad bet [vintage3d.org] for the time period.
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Such as supporting the Rendition Vérité cards
But when he get it right, he gets it quite right.
Oh hell no, you didn't say that. I still have my Integraph Rendition Verite V1000 in the garage somewhere. 2D performance was OK, not the best but works fine. 3D performance was only second to the Voodoo 1. And because of the pass-through setup of the Voodoo 1, image quality was clearer on the Rendition. VQuake was great. I was getting better frame rate than Pentium Pro 200 Mhz on my Pentium 133Mhz with bilinear filtering. Tomb Raider, Mech Warrior 2, MDK, and NASCAR (bundled game) were good and ran well. I
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The problem of the vérité was not the performance, but the manufacturing screw ups.
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I spent 3 months on yahoo auctions before I finally "won" Orchid Righteous 3D (the first mass market 3DFX card) for $99. Playing Descent on that card literally made jaws drop every time I showed it off.
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"It is consumerism that is destroying the planet"
Don't worry. The Imperator of Mars has a plan.
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Rich techbro kids trying to pretend their car is going to save the planet.
Those rich techbros were the early adopters who funded the R&D that now benefits us all.
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All? As far as I know the cheapest Tesla is still the same price as an entry level BMW or Mercedes. So it is a greenwasher product by and for rich people.
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The cost of repair should be a wash, I have never repaired a car for the first 7 years of ownership except for tires, battery and similar wearables. After that it's typically wheel bearings and similar high-stress components of some sort and perhaps an exhaust pipe that rusted, but it seems e-cars have all the same components and may have battery packs to replace.
As far as gas, the cost differential is at least ~$25-35,000. The typical US household spends an average $3000/year on gas for an average of 2.4 c
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The hydrogen pipe dreams are far worse.
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As a Tesla owner I am not pretending my car is going to save the planet. I test-drove-it, I liked-it, it was within my budget (~$450 monthly payment), I got-it. :-)
The fact that it doesn't spew smelly exhaust smoke next to me (but far away, in the power plant's chimney), it's a bonus. Teslas are the real "coal burners"
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Re:More waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you are, but even in the US coal is down to under 20% of the grid, and the percentage keeps diving off a cliff.
Also, power plants are more efficient than ICE engines. A typical gasoline engine may have ~35% peak efficiency but averages ~20% (more if it's a hybrid). By contrast, a modern combined cycle gas power plant can be over 60% efficient.
There's also the simple issue that where pollutants are emitted - excepting CO2 - actually does matter a great deal, because they have limited atmospheric lifespans. If you spew them at ground level in populated areas, vastly higher percentages will be breathed than if you spew them out the top of an elevated stack in the middle of nowhere.
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Please back up your claims. How is continuing to burn billions of gallons of oil better than battery recharging, even if those same gallons of oil are burned in a thermal power plant that is far more efficient at extracting the energy than any mechanical combustion engine?
Spoiler alert: it's not, and you're wrong.
Re: NHTSB (Score:1)
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In other non-Tesla news yesterday:
GM recalls every Chevy Bolt ever made, blames LG for faulty batteries
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The contrast to a real car manufacturer couldn't be clearer.
The real contrast is in the stock price.
Tesla's market cap is more than GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, and Volkswagen combined.
Re: Representative of the image of Tesla. (Score:1)
The real contrast is in the stock price
No; the real contrast is in Elon, his knowledge, his instincts and his management style.
The stock price is but a reflection of all this.
Re: Representative of the image of Tesla. (Score:1)
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So in your worldview the market is always right and there is no such thing as overvalued? All the bubbles that have been burst have never existed? Market manipulations aren't a thing and the SEC should be disbanded?
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And of course people keep mentioning market cap rather than the actual meaningful comparison metric, enterprise value.
A company can be massive, but if it's loaded up to its neck with debt, its market cap will be small.
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Good luck getting a "real car manufacturer" to work on a free update to improve a car they sold between 2012 and 2017. Teslas are indeed flashy toys that can also be legally driven on streets.
PS: The general feeling I get when driving my model 3 is of a oversized RC car that you can control from inside. It might not be for everybody - but I like-it.
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Teslas are indeed flashy toys that can also be legally driven on streets.
That describes approximately all cars. Otherwise we'd all be driving 2CVs, box trucks, flatbeds or Unimogs depending on what we were doing. Even the Nissan Joke (misspelling intended) which was billed as a totally basic car has all kinds of effort spent on styling. And wasted, as it turns out.
Re: Representative of the image of Tesla. (Score:1)
The contrast to a real car manufacturer couldn't be clearer.
It speaks for itself that Carmack is choosing to optimize a Tesla and not a "real" car.
Re: Representative of the image of Tesla. (Score:1)
Re:Representative of the image of Tesla. (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't say he's a god. I've spoken with him many times and he's really just a very creative engineer with a certain nack for being in the right place at the right time. He is mostly just a big kid who really likes playing with very cool toys. In fact, from what I know, each day he "works out" by playing beat saber.
I honestly have no idea how well he'd do at optimizing millions of lines of code which I can only hope is mostly a progressive web app. I'd assume that the vast majority of the code in the Tesla system is built on dozens of layers of abstraction for purposes ranging from testability to stability. But, I'd also imagine that if there are performance issues on older models which were resolved on newer models... and if the code is mostly the same at the higher levels of the stack, John will dive in and start hacking at the lower levels of the stack to solve things like OS task scheduling, reduction of unnecessary system calls, optimize the system call interface, tweak appropriate compiler settings etc...
I'd also imagine that since the Tesla seems to add more and more tensor related code, John will find appropriate tweaks for tensor mathematics. Almost all modern development in AI/ML is being done by programmers with no respect for code optimization. They are using libraries and other toolkits which are generic. I've almost never encountered a convolutional network implementation which didn't look like it was written by someone who has never seen anything but SciPy or MatLab. John will jump into that.
In case you're wondering about a great example, not John related, but in his method of working and thinking, video compression codecs where terribly slow for tons of reasons. The first and most important is that there are no processors that support optimized, single instruction bit streaming operations (at least not that aren't in the DSP class) and secondly, with the same qualifier, there are no CPUs which optimize column operations on matrices. The three biggest optimizations in codec technology which made real-time video conferencing in software practical were.
1) Optimize bit streaming by eliminating branches and cache misses. Stack multiple bit streaming operations into a single task.
2) Optimize the matrix transpose operation on CPUs. CPUs tend to have precisely the exact number of registers required for a square matrix of a given size. AVX for example has just enough space for a 16x16 matrix. It took a long time, but people at Tandberg and the x264 project almost in parallel identified methods of transposing a matrix with fewer operations than it should have taken by planning some almost magical scatter operations.
3) Perform motion vector search in a diamond pattern and rather than trying all positions, use the calculated deltas to conditionally give up when all hope is lost in a general direction.
This type of work which was really examples of the types of things John Carmack would do in the same situation (even though he's not a video guy). There haven't been any people of his caliber in the tensor world yet. There are some young and hungry ones... and there are a few people who have tweaked on thing or another, but I expect that given his recent (last year or so) interest in neural networks, he's already found corners that could be cut that may not calculate convolutional networks as precisely as the formal algorithms, but I'd expect the result to be within an acceptable margin of error.
And
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I honestly have no idea how well he'd do at optimizing millions of lines of code which I can only hope is mostly a progressive web app.
As someone who's done a bit of optimization work, my guess is that he'd not even look at all those LOCs - he'd figure out what the inner loop is and look at that. I recently took a web-database app that took over a minute for its most important calculation, left all the interface and DB stuff alone and took only the calculation loop apart, re-wrote it in Rust, called it from the PHP, and it now takes a few seconds.
There's certainly 99% of code in the Tesla UI where optimization wouldn't make a difference an
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Similarly, it's very easy for someone to write code that was "good enough" 3 years ago, but does not scale well, or suffers from otherwise higher system utilization from the rest of the system. Sometimes shit just needs a refactor.
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Going off on a tangent here but... There's no need to put "works out" in quotes when talking about Beat Saber! If you play it with that intent it's fantastic cardio, I can't even hit 180 bpm heart rate on a bike but playing three rounds of my favourite squat map in BS gets me over 190 bpm every time (as long as I'm recovered enough to play at full intensity).
In metabolic testing at the VR Institute of Health and Exercise [vrhealth.institute] and SFSU’s Kinesiology labs, the most intense games like Thrill of the Fight, Knockout League, Beat Saber, Audio Trip, and others are capable of burning more calories/minute than most dedicated workout equipment at the gym.
As far as I'm concerned exercising is the best use of VR right now.
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I can hit 190+ bpm on the bike, but Beat Saber also does a fantastic job of cardio burn. Typically on the bike I can burn 8-900 Cal/hr, with Beat Saber I generally do 30 minute sessions that burn around 300cal, so about 600 Cal/hr, which is about what I burn on a light bike ride. It's definitely good cardio, really gets my arms going, but can't provide the same sustained effort that cycling can, and I certainly couldn't do Beat Saber for 4-5 hrs like riding a century ride on a bike.
Thanks for the link to th
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I wonder if Tesla is trying to save their own bacon here.
They promised everyone who bought "Full Self Driving" five years ago that if their car needed upgrades to run it they would get them for free.
Five years and several hardware revisions later they are still nowhere near having a full self driving system working, and it looks like they might need further hardware revisions to get there. So they have a massive liability, many older vehicles that will need expensive and time consuming upgrades.
If they coul
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From the title it state it is the UI getting a performance boost, not the AI/ML features for Autopilot and Full Self Driving.
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I bet there is a lot you could do to make it faster by looking at the QML, styling, layout and interaction between QML and C++. For example, some QML that expresses itself as a percentage might not hurt in its own right but if its several layers down and part of an animation it might. Or if the UI is rendering a big list and there is an enormous lump of JS responsible for populating the list then it will be slow and bloat memory.
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Finally, someone else in this thread that understands he is working on the UI and not on Autopilot and Full Self Driving.
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Carmack is singlehandedly responsible for Oculus actually having any value whatsoever. From memory, the original software used libraries with incredibly slow numerical operations (such as integration) which he discarded in favor of hand-optimized replacements. The resulting performance increase made the Oculus the most responsive VR system in anything close to the consumer space.
There's an old evaluation done decades ago where the best programmers turn out to be 30x more productive than the worst. Carm
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The Tesla infotainment is written using the Qt framework, same as many other infotainment systems from Ford to Garmin. How would the progressive web app work? Are you saying the Tesla UI requires an internet connection to download the UI and other functions? PWA's have their place, but not as the main interface to a cars function.
Likely the interface may be implemented in QML and JS, with major functionality being written in C++ in Qt framework, along with drivers and other low level functions written in C/
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UI ... performance boost ... game developer.
Good game developers pretty much define the cutting edge of performance optimisation. Their products run almost entirely hardware constrained. Fuck man if you've ever taken an intro to programming 101 course you would have learned about Fast Inverse Square Root, an algorithm whose performance is core to a lot of computational challenges, and an algorithm optimised by ... John Carmack.
This is the most ignorant thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Ever. I mean this is so ignorant it makes BAReFO0t's comments loo
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And yet, all the "real car manufacturers" find themselves scrambling to catch up with Tesla, and marketing their BEVs as "Tesla killers".
Seems like there is a contrast, but it's not the one you are talking about.
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"The contrast to a real car manufacturer couldn't be clearer."
You mean the fraudsters who defrauded millions of people?
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Nobody is talking about redoing the UI. They're talking about improving graphics performance on old hardware. That's right up Carmack's alley.
re: improving graphics performance (Score:2)
As a former owner of a 2014 Tesla S with the older (MCU1) touchscreen infotainment system on it? I think the problems ran far deeper than just a need to accelerate the graphics performance on it? No doubt some optimization can be done in that area... but the biggest reason owners complained was after a major software upgrade made the web browser in it essentially unusable. The newer systems with faster processors (and presumably more RAM?) were eventually updated to run a Chromium-based browser. But MCU1
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One Tesla fire per 205 million vehicle miles traveled. [insideevs.com]
ICE vehicles have a fire every 19 million vehicle-miles traveled. So by your logic, every single gas and diesel car should be recalled first, as they are statistically 10x more likely to catch fire. And older vehicles are more prone to fire yet, according to the National Fire Protection Association [nfpa.org], which says that older vehicles accounted for 3/4 of highway vehicle fires. That's over 159,000 fires in 2018 alone.
So what were you saying again?
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God Mode on a Tesla should be interesting.
oh Jesus...
Re: UI? Carmack? (Score:2)
Ludicrous, Plaid, then God Mode is coming next. Plaid is already insanely fast.
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Imagine sitting in your car, and as you start it, it asks you what difficulty you want to drive on today.
Or it just defaults to "Hurt me plenty".
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Congratulations on a stunning display of having no idea what the discussion is about, but feeling compelled to comment anyway.
Nobody is talking about redesign of the UI. They are talking about performance optimizations of the existing UI.
Cart <-- Horse (Score:3)
Both the summary and TFA (nearly the same, btw) simply say Carmack has been working with Tesla a bit on the UI performance.
There is no mention of tangible results or even a hint that either of them are optimistic that an improvement is actually possible.
This article is void of any substance. For all we know, Carmack looked at the specs over a weekend and will let them know in a few days that the hardware is hopelessly underpowered. A gaming analogy seems fitting here: You can't turn a Super Nintendo into an Xbox One.
Re:Cart -- Horse (Score:1)
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Okay, slow your roll kid. That's nonsense.
Super Mario 3 was an MMC3 cartridge which provided some extra memory mapping facilities and the ability to set up a scanline interrupt. The extra RAM it contained was used to save game state (didn't you ever wonder how Super Mario 3 could save games?),
The first example of what you're talking about was the Super FX RISC co-processor in the Starfox64 cartridge designed by Argonaut. It rendered polygons into an on-cartridge buffer which was then DMA'd over to the
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Re:Cart -- Horse (Score:3)
It's probably the same idiocy that causes bad performance from apps on an Xbox One machine. I mean, I've seen some of these apps having trouble rendering a few dozen images on a machine that is easily capable of rendering a few million polys without breaking a sweat. You do this by creating roughly fifty abstraction layers between you and the hardware, and creating your app in JavaScript or some nonsense like that instead of using the native APIs like God intended to get reasonable performance.
I wouldn't
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I think Tesla is using C++/Qt.
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Well, there goes my theory. It was good while it lasted.
I wish Carmack luck, digging through Qt and trying find the slowdowns. He might have some luck if there's some really horribly-written rendering drivers slowing things down, which would be right in his wheelhouse.
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>Well, there goes my theory.
Piffle. You can write dogshit code in C++ with a little effort, TYVM!
Not that we needed any more convincing, but this is a yet another great example of how high-performance machines make it even easier for crummy programmers to produce bloated slow code that can't scale.
Eventually someone (like Carmack) puts their foot down and says no, I won't just "throw more hardware at the problem." The mantra of terrible managers and terrible coders everywhere. It is especially galling to
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You do this by creating roughly fifty abstraction layers between you and the hardware, and creating your app in JavaScript or some nonsense like that
But... but... the computer studies 101 in the modern university of today teach to use abstraction and modules and small compact reusable units with detached interfaces, packaged in libraries that get bundled together in compact micro-apps which talk to each other via clear, generic interfaces using a well-defined common data exchange format!
Heresy! Hang the witch!
Re:Cart -- Horse (Score:2)
A gaming analogy seems fitting here: You can't turn a Super Nintendo into an Xbox One.
Game developers do, however, manage to squeeze more and more performance out of consoles as time progresses and they learn the tricks and shortcuts. Every generation has those games that are released a couple years in which everyone thought impossible performance-wise when the console came out.
Re:Cart -- Horse (Score:2)
Your comment is a prime example of saying true things and yet coming to a completely worthless conclusion.
It would be surprising if there weren't opportunities for optimization in Tesla's software.
Re:Cart -- Horse (Score:2)
This is John Carmack we are talking about, he is one of the best programmers in the world and he is doing the very thing that made him so famous.
Tesla hardware is not a SNES, it is (I think) a Tegra 3, maybe the best mobile SoC of 2011, its gaming performance is, I think, on the level of a Wii, but with HD capabilities.
When we see electron apps, it is easy to forget how powerful modern hardware is. If the Tesla UI cannot run at 60 fps, single frame latency, it is only because of software, the question is on
So he is stingy? (Score:2)
Reminds me of the xkcd when circle tries to hack into linux kernel to override mute and force an audible alert instead of ringing the doorbell...
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UI Issues aside ... (Score:2)
I am sure that the older car owners will appreciate it if they do it, but along the same lines:
Telsa has been promising that its cars will have FSD capability for a number of years now. I think at least as far back as 2017 and maybe sooner. In other words all that they were supposed to be lacking was a software upgrade to be released any time now.
So how far back will the current generation FSD work without a hardware upgrade? I have a hard time believing that there has been not been any performance/c
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FSD needs the 7 cameras that the newer ones have but the older Model S does not.
Also the latest FSD computer - this one can be upgraded but the side cameras cannot be easily retrofit.
Carnac the Magnificent (Score:2)
History shows [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent] that Carnac will find the answer. Younger acolytes on this venue may not be aware of Carnac. "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the crotch of the person seated next to me, and may his arms be too short to scratch" (sorry, you'll have to follow the link for that reference).
If I have somehow misidentified the savior of Tesla's UI, please forgive...
Sneer Sneer Sneer (Score:1)
This will greatly simplify vehicle maintenance (Score:1)