We released it as pure speculation and we are finally going to be right. The jump from Intel to AMD is causing a headache for Tesla, since, although Lisa Su’s SoC is much more powerful than Intel’s cheap option, the reality is that it is also much hotter and Elon’s Musk seems that they have not calibrated this fact well in many models of their cars, since their Tesla have problems from temperature with the amd Ryzen.
Tesla’s objective was to offer greater performance in its systems, greater fluidity and all without increasing the final cost of its cars. The trade-offs analyzed by those at Elon Musk were simply a reduction of about one 2.4% battery of their cars, something that was acceptable given the jump in performance, but… More problems came.
The TDP switch from Intel to AMD and Tesla’s temperature problems
It went from a modest Intel Atom A3950 with four cores at 1.6 GHz to make the leap to the MCU3 system with AMD (Ryzen YE180FC3T4MFG (4 Cores (Zen 2) with 45 watts of consumption) and with it and despite the fact that the main tests did not detect anything anomalous, although the increase in temperature was evident, all the parameters were within the expected.
Except for one fact: during a load the AMD SoC was left without enough cooling because the vehicle’s energy was used to prevent the car batteries from heating up, thus achieving longer life and a shorter charging time.
The problem is that the thermal management of the AMD unit was blocked by lack of supply of that same energyso it wasn’t cooling properly and this is causing performance issues. Specifically, there is information about lag on the touch screen of vehicles or directly a blank screen that does not let you do anything in the car.
Security problems that force the withdrawal of 130,000 cars
Since Tesla’s system for its vehicles focuses everything on the multimedia system and the screen, having these problems has an impact on safety. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from the USA this issue allows the rear view camera, or access to certain key controls locked increase the risk of possible collision with another vehicle or pedestrian.
Obviously, when discovering the problem, Tesla has withdrawn no less than 130,000 cars waiting for a solution that seems to arrive shortly, since it is a simple software problem that the company will solve with a OTA update. The numbers offered by Elon Musk are really low, since only one 1% of cars would be affected by this temperature problem in Teslas with AMD SoC.
Logically those that arrived with Intel SoC are not affected. The vehicles that will receive this OTA are the Model S, Model X (2021 and 2022) and the last Model 3 and Model Y of this year. There is no information about the rest of the models and years, but they should not be affected since the change from Intel to AMD occurred only a few months ago.
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