![The Supercomputer in Your Garage: How Your Car Is the Most Advanced Electronic Device You Own [Infographic]](http://blog.caranddriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Supercomputer-in-Your-Garage-placement-626x382.jpg "The Supercomputer in Your Garage: How Your Car Is the Most Advanced Electronic Device You Own [Infographic]")
Our culture is preoccupied with electronics. We buy all manner of silicon-enhanced stuff, from laptops and smartphones to WiFi-enabled refrigerators and robotic Roomba vacuums—some $204 billion worth of it every year. Headlines scream with each new announcement from Apple; Steve Jobs has replaced Henry Ford as the patron saint of American industry. It's no wonder, then, that mainstream enthusiasm for automobiles has been overtaken by gadgets. Compared with the iPad, cars seem so 20th century. Yet the newest cars actually contain more highly sophisticated computing networks than you can shake a motherboard at.
 65 percent of in-car processors are either application-specific or 4- or 8-bit chips with less than 256 kB of memory, roughly equivalent to an Atari 2600 game console. |  30 percent are 16- or 32-bit with up to 2 MB of memory, roughly equivalent to a Super Nintendo game console. |  5 percent are 32-bit processors with 4 or more MB of memory, like the original Sony PlayStation. The most advanced of these even have multi-core processors similar to those in your laptop, but with slower clock speeds and less memory. |
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 Ultimate Networking Machine: BMW pioneered the use of in-car Ethernet for diagnostics and rear-seat entertainment in the 2009 7-series. The 2014 X5 uses Ethernet to send high-def images from its surround-view parking cameras. Ethernet offers greater bandwidth, lower cost, and a 30-percent weight reduction over current networks. | ||
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 The average vehicle now contains about $300 worth of electronic circuits, up 65 percent in the last decade. | ||
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 Collision-avoidance image processing tops the list of data-intensive in-vehicle applications, requiring 100 billion operations per second.
A typical modern car contains more than three miles of copper wire weighing more than 150 pounds. |  Audi's implementation of Google Earth and the Tesla Model S's 17-inch touch screen and instrument cluster are powered by Nvidia Tegra processors. The next generation of these chips will perform at 384 GFLOPS, or billions of floating point operations, per second. With four processors per car, a two-car garage would have as much computing power as the $120 million Blue Mountain supercomputer installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998.
After the engine and transmission, the wiring harness is the heaviest component in the car. |
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from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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