Whoever at micron that said this is obviously some novel kind of idiot.
Old kinda idiot. Marketing Dept pumping stock with “white paper”.
With the current level of tech in a car, you’re already likely pushing 300GB in total. There’s dozens of high-compute ECUs doing all sorts of things, running some *nix OS and using anywhere from a couple GB to well… way more.
to reach full driverless capability, those will need to become more powerful, the software will require more memory, and the number of compute modules will likely increase as well for sensors and other stuff.
300GB IMO is probably a conservative estimate.
I’m not trying to sound angry at you, but I’m told I come off that way. So please let me start this with an advanced apology.
We have the esp32 in very common circulation. We have seen what is required to keep a thing fucking airborne, and it is so beyond what I thought was possible twenty years ago. And they did it with <1 gig.
No worries, nothing grouchy sounding there :)
My statement is sourced by me working in R&D in the automotive industry on these modules… an ESP32 does not come close to the amount of computing resources needed to move and process the absolute boat load of information required to make decisions for autonomous driving.
Flying around doesn’t need the same level of object detection, path-finding, decision making and so on that a vehicle that is capable of killing anyone in or around it needs. And on top, it has to be able to do that at highway speeds, without ever making a mistake - because of the killing everyone in or around it part.
Further, it needs to deal with all the random stuff all those people are doing around it all the time… again, without ever making a mistake.
So it needs to be able to see something, identify if it’s something it needs to be concerned about, figure out if it might be doing something that needs to be addressed, make a plan, then execute it… in like a few milliseconds. with a virtually unlimited number of potential obstacles, while obeying traffic laws, and still get the occupant to their destination.
Without killing anyone.
And that’s just the ADAS subsystem.
Yeah, I guess I didn’t take into account that airborne is easier considering encountering randomly moving objects.
But 300gigs is a bad number on at least 2 different levels.
300? Come on. We all know it comes in powers of 2.
AI write that?
Shovel vendor forecasts massive uptick in hole digging.
Each will also need a portable nuclear reactor and a swimming pool filled with the blood of innocents and ice cubes made out of children’s tears, for cooling purposes.
Jesus. People are still talking about self-driving cars?
People still think we’ll be driving them on Mars. Elon Musk had incredible penetration with idiots.
This is an idea that should be shelved for a good 20-30 years, honestly.
We’d need global collaboration to come up with a universal standard applied to all cars (regardless of price). If it can’t be a standard, then it’s a bullshit idea. Competing standards and companies simply means abandoned tech everywhere and everything, thinking their tech is best, nothing works together, issues across the board, and high cost to customers.
We should just build walkable cities. It doesn’t even require any new knowledge, we can start right now and there are even many places in the US, the shittest of us all, where there’s honestly nothing really stopping us.
Self-driving cars are dumb because they are a tonne of work to ultimately solve zero problems when we could do basically nothing special and improve everyone’s lives within our lifetimes.
Cities can be walkable and have self driving cars. We sure can have less cars, but it sure sounds better than letting everyone drive. Also, some people can’t walk & need assistance moving.
Sure, but we’re acting like self-driving cars will save us and not like they’re a neat little extra thing. Yes, some people donneed assistance moving, but there are entire para-taxi services that could receive better funding. In Ottawa, for example, the public transit service has a whole program called “ParaTranspo” with soecialized buses and everything. People who have trouble moving, in our society, are very not going to be able to afford self-driving cars and even if they did many will not be able to get themselves into them without assistance anyway. Also, in well-built neighbourhoods, people with disabilities can get around on their own on scooters and such, even in the winter; I see this in my own neighbourhood all the time and they are so mich more free than if they were tied to a car.
Self-driving cars aren’t much more than cheap propaganda that people slurp up so they can keep pretending that cars are a viable form of personal transport outside of edge cases. As someone with a sportscar who mostly just takes public transit and walks I can assure you, cars are largely stupid and we’re kinda dumb for wanting them.
People should just drive the car.
Are you aware of just how bad people are at that?
Waymo robotaxis are already better drivers than humans, by a lot.
Let’s see Waymo in not ideal climates. I do not understand this obsession with robot taxis. Waymo is still losing money and would have been a better business if they just hired cab drivers.
As bad as people are, something like a Tesla is much worse
And something like a Waymo costs $250,000+ which is… Hard to swallow
https://sfist.com/2025/04/25/you-might-soon-be-able-to-buy-and-own-your-own-self-driving-waymo-car/
L0 ADAS for life, baby!
I imagine pople stealing RAM from cars.
No way they would make it upgradable or user serviceable lol
They just get really fast and accurate with soldering irons. Until later ones come along absolutely surgical with a flame thrower.
They’re almost certainly going to be soldered chips instead of traditional ram sticks.
Soldered, and often in hard to get to places in the vehicle. it’d be easier and more lucrative to strip the wiring for the copper.
How? It’s soldered on.
I’m not saying that’s realistic, but I imagine my cyberpunk thieves now with portable soldering stations and microscopes
Like catalytic converters?
We went to the moon with Kbs and now cars need Gbs?
We went to the moon with rooms of women with pencils.
There is a lot less traffic/pedestrians in space.
I’m reading that headline as: Major electronics company explains why self driving cars and home robots will be unaffordable.
Only because of current RAM prices and artificial scarcity keeping those prices high.
300GB of RAM shouldn’t be that expensive. I have 1/3 of that in my server (bought years ago). If it wasn’t for the AI bullshit, 300GB would be fairly reasonable to buy in a couple of years time.
“You know that thing we sell? Buy a shitload of it.”
More like, you know that thing we used to sell and now we don’t because we bet everything on ai datacenters? Well now we bet on robots because we raised the price so high nobody will afford to buy that thing we used to sell and we can’t go back to that price because the line must go up!
They think that makes them sound smart and important.
It actually makes them sound incompetent.
No no no. See, this is why AI is so fucked up. It doesn’t matter if it’s human or driverless. Cars aren’t supposed to RAM anything!!!
They should dodge not ram.
Obviously a company that makes RAM will say RAM is important, what else would we expect?
I’d love to know what Waymo vehicles have though.
LIDAR. They have lidar.
They saw Jensen say engineers should be burning tokens to keep warm and thought “fuck it, let’s do this”.
when the loot chests move around the map
I definitely misread Micron as Macron, and was confused why the French president was chiming in on this conversation
