bogus

I was reading the Top Gear magazine, a print companion to the TV show.

In it, they were describing the engine management of the new BMW M3. It has a 4.0 litre V8 and puts out 420 hp, and has a 8300 RPM redline.

The engines controller processes all the info needed at a rate of - get this - 200 MILLION instructions-per-second.

To put that into perspective, when the C4 came out in 1984, it was considered, by and far, the most advanced car on the road, in regards to it's engine management and support systems. That ECU was processing at a rate of - get this - 15 instructions-per-second.

That means computer power has increased by a factor of 13,333,333.

That is just mind boggling.

I suspect that other modern engine controllers are in the same league, but admittedly, the M3s engine is doing some serious work... managing valve timing, knock, ignition, fuel, all of that at those engine speeds. So perhaps other engines don't need that much CPU power, but I suspect many are in the upper ranges of 100 million-instructions-per-second.

Bob CTS

That is amazing, always boggles the mind that something can calculate inputs that fast. I wonder what the space shuttle can do since it was built in what the late 70's to early 80's, but surely it has been updated.

redwing76

Computer proscessing are up? Hello! I would hope so.

ynk1121

wow. i wonder how big the computer would have been to be able to process 200 Million instructions-per-second in 1984. probably would have needed a pickup bed out back

Corvette Kid

The engine management and resulting efficiency of later C4s and then the LS engine cars is still very impressive to me. And while I don't think that they're anything to be sneezed at, this is obvious proof that we've only just scratched the surface.

90Z51

200 Million is a nice sounding number (and certainly much more powerful than our C4s), but ordinary desktop computers in the late 90's were capable of well more than that.

corvettedan22

Good info to know.

Now if the Corvette Forum Server can process that much

did I just say that....

Ya. well they are working on it and it may be in place b.c. it does seem faster....

bogus

that may be true, but, considering the hostile nature of the car environment, and the size of the computer, it's pretty damned impressive.

A co-worker used to work in the defence industry, about 30 odd years ago. The company he was with was working on a couple of different projects (this was a smaller supplier/software firm). One was the software that ran the early HUD systems for F14s and such. The computers used to run the HUD was about the size of a microwave oven. The system used liquid nitrogen (this is at sealevel, cause at altitude, the air was much colder) to cool it. The air going in was super chilled, the air coming out was hot enough to dry your hair. Talk about over clocking a few CPUs!!!!

JD'S WHITE 93

I wonder if it's possible to troubleshoot that thing with a paperclip and counting the blinks of the check engine light
The technology in my C4 is enough to make me want a big block C3

cv67

Yeah, 2 weeks ago, it just posted tonight though.

I thought the 84 Vette commercial (one on Youtube)claimed their computer made adjustments 60 times per second...Oh well.

bogus

either way, it's a far cry from 200 million!

Swift_Striker

hehheh sounds like I picked the right field of engineering to get into (computer engineering)

wmupaprmkr

I think Bogus makes a good point that in teh past 20 years, more and more of the cars operational data is being looked at. I am not sure that this is a good thing or not just for the pure point of the manufacturer can limit certain performance items...but on the other hand they can look at a ton more data to tweak some more ponies out from under the hood!
I sit here reflecting on the personal PC's too...remember when 28K of RAM was high end?? I can remember buying 16K ram cards for $75 a piece! Now you buy megabytes of ram for that!
More and more of the BMW's type of data processing will be evident in the years to come...for me, it means less and less of the car that I do not understand and cannot work on!

mikeb

Well, I think I need all 200 millions of those instructions, so that I can be annoyed with the low tire inflation symbol on the dash of the wife's car, whenever the tire goes below 28PSI.

Technology, what would we do without it.


(BTW, I'm an embedded CPU Circuit board designer for Industrial equip.)

bogus

yea, but I doubt the engine controller cares about the tires... that's a job for the CCM!

VetteUSA

FELNGR8

NASA is slow to change anything that is proven. The shuttle computers are still VAXs running VAX software.

(My son is an Aerospace Engineer very frustrated with NASA and their priorities)

Muffin

The entire Shuttle fleet has been upgraded more than once. If you really want an I opener look at the Apollo moon vehicles. Think Atari 64 range.

bogus

The original Shuttle computer was the same as the Apollo computer... it was called a GPC - General Purpose Computer. It had a whole 8k of memory. That's why launches were scrapped so frequently, they only had enough memory to store for one launch scenerio.

Another thought: An ad I read tonite in the new Car & Driver. The Z06... 505hp, 0-60 in 3.7 seconds, a top speed of 198, returns 26mph highway.

j3studio

I think one of the most amazing things we've gotten out of the more advanced electronic systems is how we can have our cake and it too with horsepower/torque and mileage. With our almost completely stock LS1 in our 2003 'vert, we did a 7,700 mile trip in 2005 and averaged 28.6 mpg with no real thought toward restraint ...

.. I compare my 9.0:1 compression L98 (at 230 bhp/330 lb-ft and 16/23 EPA mpg) versus my 10.1:1 compression LS1 (at 350 bhp/360 lb-ft and 18/25 EPA mpg) both with the 4-speed automatic, same size engine, and about the same weight and there's definitely something going on here.