As part of the run up to CES 2017, we are launching a series of weekly blogs to address automotive industry topics that we feel will be prominent at CES in January. Stay tuned to the QNX Auto blog throughout the month of December for more.
One of the coolest things about my job is getting to see all the silicon roadmaps. OK, I’m a nerd, which is not a surprise to anyone, I’m sure. Still, there’s a lot of amazing innovation going on. You just haven’t heard about. Yet. (And you won’t hear it from me. Sorry.)
One thing I will say though is that the embedded world – at least in the areas that QNX plays – is going 64-bit. And has pretty much already gone 64-bit, actually. Intel architecture has been 64-bit for as long as I can remember. ARMv8 is almost exclusively 64-bit. With those two platforms going that way it means that it’s here and is real.
Graphics is another important embedded domain that is moving fast. The latest embedded GPUs are really impressive. I know of one chip that actually has two full-blown GPUs on a single die. The things I’m seeing on the bench are amazing. They are light-years ahead of where we were only a generation ago.
Roadmap alignment is key in the embedded software space. We need to make sure our products play perfectly with our silicon partners' technology. We need to make sure customers can take the latest SoCs and build the things stuff the world wants. That's the whole idea.
One of the things the world wants these days is a digital cockpit - a unified experience across multiple displays in the cabin. That is happening today but it takes two SoCs to do it, one for the instrument cluster and one for infotainment system. It also takes space, power, cabling, connectors, and inter-processor communication. that can be a hassle.
The obvious dream is to eliminate all this cost and complexity and just use a single SoC for both. Easy. The problem is that digital instrument clusters and infotainment systems are different, and that includes having different ASIL safety certification requirements.
Infotainment systems need alot of horsepower, and they use alot of memory. Navigation systems alone can drive addressing past 4 Gigabytes. They also have huge state diagrams, and need to support major eye-candy. Afterall, appearance is the final product as far as carmakers and end users are concerned. Therefore, GPU performance is key.
Digital instrument clusters need incredibly smooth graphics performance, but they are relatively simple otherwise. However, one thing that is not so simple is the need for functional safety. This is where ISO-26262 certification enters the scene. The idea is to overlay that with making sure that what you think you are rendering is actually what gets displayed. If the screen says P(ark) and the car is in R(everse) people can get hurt. Or worse. Safety has many dimensions including the human interface, which is why SoCs that render what the eye sees need safety certification.
What do you need to make all this work? For sure you need a 64-bit safety-certified embedded OS. You need a hypervisor with the ability share graphics across virtual machines. You need ISO-26262 top to bottom, as well as a way to ensure the cluster-rendered output matches the intended output. And, you need an SoC with the juice to make it all happen. That’s a lot of technology, so it is no wonder people think the single chip digital cockpit is still a dream.
But maybe it’s not. Maybe you should come see us at CES 2017 in the North Hall and see more about how that dream is becoming closer to reality..
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