I remember reading that the Model S user interfaces are powered by an nVidia Tegra 3 (Center display), and an nVidia Tegra 2 (Driver's instrument display).
Are people finding the computer systems fast and responsive enough?
I wonder what Tesla has planned for future cars, because ARM processors continue to evolve rapidly in terms of computing power, configuration, and energy efficiency.
Also, I wonder when LTE will become available.
Is there a networking module that can be easily replaced?
It's a bit of a myth that ARM processors are inherently more efficient than Intel processors. Tesla would have actually been better suited with an Atom right now. E.g.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6529/busting-the-x86-power-myth-indepth-clover-trail-power-analysis
But anyway, no the browser is definitely not responsive enough to be terribly useful, from a 3-fold perspective. Slow processor, slow network, slow software.
Even though the display is bigger, because of the slow response times, my wife and I generally end up falling back to our phones to look things up, rather than using the car's browser. It's fine for caching a few sites to always pull up, like TSLA stock quote (and AXPW for laughs), Recargo/Plugshare, Valet instructions, but not for general browsing.
The 17" GPS is also not very responsive, but that primarily seems to be due to slow network, and Tesla is addressing that with cached tiles, presumably in 5.0.
The controls for the car are great and responsive though. To the point where you don't miss manual controls. It seems like everything Tesla did completely in-house it's great, and everything where they had to communicate with a 3rd party to make work, not so much. This is actually not unlike the rest of Tesla. You can tell a lot of a company's internal politics by looking at the software it produces.
If I had any kind of graphics skills, I would update the famous org charts (below) to add Tesla, with of course a haloed deity in the middle and everyone else kneeling before him, but inside a bubble with a long line of people on the outside trying desperately to get inside.
