I don’t know if it’s DDR5. Probably soldered onto a custom board. Here’s an article that says the average now is 90 GB RAM+NAND: https://www.micron.com/about/blog/applications/automotive/new-research-shows-cars-need-more-memory-than-a-rocket
RAM+NAND is really useless, like I can say my old laptop is 128.5GB RAM+NAND and it has 512MB ram with 128GB SSD
Combining RAM and NAND (flash) into one stat is really annoying as they are nothing alike. I’m assuming almost all of that is NAND, with 2 or 4GB of it being RAM.
lmao. EV ram is the new ICE catalytic converter
A modern ICE car would have both.
According to this reverse engineering effort, Tesla MCUs have 4GB of DDR4 onboard.
That is just the MCU, mind you, and I’m not sure what exactly it’s responsible for besides media, but besides whatever AI nonsense they use for self-driving which might have a good chunk of RAM onboard, it seems likely to me that most other computerized components are just using SOC (system-on-chip) processors with integrated onboard memory, not dedicated DDR. I am not an expert though, and may be wrong.
It’s not so much that the cars use ddr5, I doubt they do. The problem is slop generators have booked the manufacturing capacity of the fabs for the next while meaning other chips can’t be produced or produced at a smaller volume.
New new form of stealing people’s catalytic converters
It would be embedded. Not on sticks.
It costs more to carefully cut the memory ICs off a motherboard and repackage them than to just buy RAM.
In rare cases it can be done (like how Chinese shops resolder GDDR to make 48GB RTX 4090s), but I don’t see EV RAM being worth it.
But to answer your question… some self driving systems or even infotainment systems do have a somewhat substantial amount of RAM.
Pro tip: go for the motor. Or the battery, if you can swing it.
The verge Vergecast podcast did a piece on RAM, and it’s well worth a listen. They talk about all sorts of RAM related things, the RAM in a Cybertruck being one of them. Sorry, I don’t remember the details but I remember it being lower than I thought; 8GB, maybe 16gb. Give it a listen.
8gb is much more than i would expect.
Like wth would the car’s shitty computer even be doing to use 8gb? They aren’t playing games or running local big machine learning models. Highly doubt that even the crappiest spyware would be able to benefit from so many resources
infotainment is effectively a pc. How much ram would you expect in a pc running all that? Everything else probably isn’t much, but that system will have a lot. Often the backseat has sysems which need more.
If it’s running Linux, you can get away with just 2 GB.
Self driving?
Downvotes aside, all swasticars have the built in capability for their “self driving” and that processing is performed locally on an onboard computer with ram.
The AI overview says about the 24-25 stat is about 90gb but that’s not the main driver for the shortage. It’s more due the first bit of my statement - AI. The companies creating these AI models are sucking up all the RAM.
Bro if you don’t have any clue about the answer, just don’t answer.
90GB is an absurd number for two reasons:
- That’s significantly more RAM than any car has
- RAM capacity is in powers of 2, which 90 isn’t. You could do 128GB, which is an even more absurd amount, or 64, which could be reasonable for a crazy infotainment system.
Don’t trust AI to give you answers if you don’t know how to tell when it lies to you.
Individual modules may usually be powers of two, but a machine can make use of multiple mismatched modules. 64+16+4+4+2=90
I do still think that AI overview answer is bogus, but it’s not impossible.
EDIT: Now that I think of it, I have definitely seen individual consumer DIMMs in 24, 48, or 96 GB. So, not always just powers of two.
It used to be all powers of 2, but kinda starting around DDR5 they started appearing in a sort of “sub power of 2”, so it’ll be two different powers of 2 added together - typically one step away from each other. So you’ll get like 16+8 (24) or 32+16 (48) or 64+32 (96)
Both very good points.
Counter point to the mismatched modules point (I’m currently running 24GB in my own rig, so I did think of that possibility): I am pretty confident that there aren’t any cars running around with 5 ram slots. You could just sum the two 4 sticks to one 8 stick and throw it in a common dual channel four slot board, but then you’re mixing capacities on each channel, which either causes issues or just doesn’t work (it’s been a minute since I’ve done it). Also, from a manufacturing standpoint, having to install/manage four completely different items doesn’t scale as easily as just having one. In the volume that they’re buying, I’d bet that the cost savings from using smaller sticks would be pretty minimized by the extra cost/complexity of setting up processes for multiple items.
I’m going to look into the weird DIMM sizes that you mentioned. I’ve never seen them, so it might just be a gap in knowledge on my part.
I found this comment:
IIRC, SDR -> DDR4 were a single 64bit wide data bus to the DIMM, but with DDR5 that was changed to a 2x 32bit data bus, thus allowing 2x 32bit reads to the DIMM to done independently. Due to the change to 32bit wide channels we can now have non power of 2 sizing of the actual memory chip itself… (basically the addressing modes changed to allow this).
And that seems to be backed up under “subchannels” on the ddr5 Wikipedia page.
Neato, thanks for teaching me something new
In a car they are only putting in what thay need. The ram is soldered in so it can’t fall off when you hit a bump - that or complex/expensive fasteners.
So you used AI to generate an incorrect answer and then blamed it on said AI use?
lul, the world is so fucked :D I can’t even.
t… thanks?
is it ddr5 though.
Traditionally automotive tended to use parts on older technologies, but since cars became essentially tablets with wheels, I’m not sure whether it applies or not anymore
