ThinkPads and turbochargers
by Mark Hopkins
In my last post, I asked what interesting ways our customers were using Lenovo PCs.
How about using your ThinkPad to help tune your car? I caught up with Jim, fellow gear head and ThinkPadder, to see how he is using a ThinkPad X60s to capture a plethora of engine and vehicle sensor data under a variety of conditions. Once captured, or logged, the data can be played back, graphed and the values cross compared and analyzed. With the help of an experienced programmer, the engine’s operating parameters can be tweaked to take full advantage of mechanical modifications, and the ThinkPad is employed again to “flash” that updated code into the ECU’s memory. (Engine Control Unit)
Jim summarizes the how and why in the video below, but to really appreciate what he’s doing, it’s helpful to understand a bit about the mechanical work going on alongside the computer wizardry. I suggest you check out a few of the posts on Jim’s blog. In this first one, he outlines some of the changes he’s already made to his Mitsubishi Evo 9 including chassis stiffening, larger intercooler, variable cams, larger exhaust system, and upgraded turbo charger and radiator on the way. The computer programming will be interactively updated to optimize each of these changes.
I rode with Jim and manned the laptop as he collected real world driving data. I was impressed by the kind of data that the software was able to pull in – air temperature, turbo boost pressure, fuel injector pulse width, short and long term fuel trim, engine rpm and vehicle speed, ignition timing and knock count – perhaps close to 50 in all. I understood perhaps half of them. Equally impressive was the considerable power this programming produced. Knock counts (mentioned in the video) are important signs that there may be too much timing advance, too much boost pressure, too high an inlet air temperature, or too lean a fuel mixture. Managed optimally, the engine can run close to an ideal air / fuel mixture to make the most power with the least fuel, while maintaining longevity.
Comprehensive data gathering and optimization of the ECU programming allow modern engines, especially turbo-charged / inter-cooled ones to deliver unrivaled power and efficiency.
I guess this makes ThinkPad a real power tool.
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July 29th, 2009 2:28 pm
Great post Mark. Good to see/hear you and Jim again. This made my day
What, no clip of the Evo driving over the ThinkPad?
July 29th, 2009 2:53 pm
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August 5th, 2009 10:13 am
This is cool but it doesn’t require a lot of computing power to tune a chip for a fuel injection system, I use my old thinkpad 380ED for that. When will Lenovo get serious about having multi core GPU technology in a laptop for the people that have heavy duty number crunching and graphics needs. Oops I said graphics, you probably started thinking about online gamers. I create 3D renderings of architectural spaces for commercial clients. 30 frames of video for one second of playback. If you render a 1024 x 768 picture thats roughly 768,000 pixels at 24 bit color depth that need calculations for RGB and lighting, shadows and reflections for each frame. 30 seconds of video creates a huge file. Lucas films rendered the original 90 minute Toy Story movie at 8000 x 8000 resolution and stepped it down for film transfer. It took them two years to render on a huge cluster of machines. My sub $500 Acer Aspire with AMD 64 bit duo core 4 GB ram and and NVidia 9100 M can render a 1024 x 768 frame with 350,000 faces in 5 seconds it makes my T-61 lwith Intel 965 mobile graphics look like a toy. Applications from Adobe for video editing and even Matlab have patches and versions out that are CUDA compatible so serious business users can take advantage of multi core GPU’s. Nvidia CUDA and ATI STREAM are here; they are the turbochargers for computers today.
August 5th, 2009 12:45 pm
Duc900rider,
I agree that raw computing power isn’t required for this. This wasn’t so much the point of the post as Jim’s using an X60s which is several generations old. I really wanted to get people thinking about cool stuff that can be done with computers other than surfing the web, gaming, running general business applications, etc. For Raw computing power, especially graphic work, I would look at the W700 – it also has an Nvidia GPU and is certainly heavy duty as laptops go. Rendering is probably worth a whole post or series of posts – I remember when Silicon Graphics were THE boxes to do rendering on. I had some limited opportunity to see them in use – the indigo, the onyx, etc… of course that was 15 years ago.
Given progression of Moore’s law and advances in the laptop space, I wouldn’t be surprised to see quad core CPU Laptops. And as you ask, why not muticore GPUs ? Who knows?
If your big into rendering, I’d like to hear more from you… Cool stuff !!
August 9th, 2009 9:26 am
Doesn’t the W700 have quad core cpu??
Packing a dual core GPU in the laptop is fairly easy, but to manage the heat output on it is another matter.
The nvidia GPU in the T61 are all CUDA capable, but for some reasons they are not switched on.
Do you see the power requirement for the Quadro FX5800 and heatsink/fan assembly on that??
Distributed computing like Stanford’s Protein Folding@Home could point the way to the future of cheap supercomputing…
Intel in 2007 have already prototyped a 80 core CPU…
http://news.cnet.com/Intel-sho.....58181.html
but it will take a few years before it will find its way into people’s computers and laptops.
August 14th, 2009 4:49 am
Interesting application. i do second Duc900rider’s opinion and i understand the motive behind this article as well.
Alienware has a quad core laptop in India (M17x) with the graphics in SLI (as well as hybrid SLI mode). But it is more a desktop replacement than a portable option. Moore than enough for what has been stated here.
Even AMD-based portables with dedicated graphics (with reasonable amounts of VRAM) should cut it.
However, I would question the ability to handle higher temps if the laptops are used over an extended period of time.