Tesla’s center display is showing massive performance improvement with new AMD chip

Tesla’s center display is showing a massive performance improvement with its new AMD Ryzen chip. Hopefully, it will make it into more vehicles.

As we reported last week, Tesla has started deliveries of the Model Y Performance in China.

For Tesla followers outside of China, it was nothing too exciting since the Model Y Performance has been in production for years at Fremont Factory for the North American market.

But the Model Y Performance in China is a new version built at Gigafactory Shanghai, and it’s expected to feature a few changes.

We reported on one that was quickly spotted by new buyers taking delivery: Tesla introduced an AMD chip for the media computer (MCU).

It replaces an Intel Atom chip that currently powers the center display of most Tesla vehicles, apart from the now Model Y Performance made in China, and in the new Model S and Model X, which are also powered by a new AMD chip.

Now we get a first look at how much better the new AMD chip is in a side-by-side comparison with a Tesla vehicle equipped with the Intel chip:

They ran tests by looking at how long it takes to fully load apps like Youku and Bilibili on both media centers.

As you can see, the new AMD chip shows a massive performance improvement by being more than twice as fast while opening the apps.

They also tested Tesla’s native navigation and map apps, which also show massive improvement in buffer speed and map load time.

Electrek’s Take

That’s awesome. We are not quite yet talking about desktop and smartphone speed, but it’s getting quite close.

Now the question is: Is Tesla moving the new AMD chip to more vehicles?

For now, it sounds like it’s just in the Model Y Performance in China and new Model S/X vehicles produced at Fremont Factory.

I think we will see them in new cars, but I don’t know how soon.

Tesla has shown that it is aware of the importance of computing power inside its vehicles going forward, and much like the rest of the personal computing industry, it’s going to regularly update its computers with more performance.

That’s both for driver-assist/self-driving systems and for the media center.