taycan pcm processor/ram upgrade?

[tonycolin]

im aware it would probably be pretty extensive and would involve soldering, but HYPOTHETICALY would this be possible? any technologically inclined person who can chime in? would the PCM have to be coded to make use of it? it would be nice to have a more responsive PCM

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[Johan Meert]

Sure. Most of the PCM boards in any car use a standard operating system. Increasing system memory (or storage memory) can lead to a (drastic) increase of UI speed without any software changes.
I remember my 2017 Tesla model S where the onboard storage was very limited and caused the system to slow down and finally stop working due to wearout of the flash storage. At a 3rd party I had the memory read out, chips desoldered and replaced with a larger capacity (I think it was from 16 to 64GB). That made a huge difference.

 

[chun]

I would also be intrested.

But the difference between taycan and tesla is that tesla sold millions; and there are people servicing teslas; while for the taycan, I have yet to see a service that offers anything of value...

 

[whitex]

Maybe, maybe not. Not sure what the native host OS is for PCM (the apps run in docker containers), but a lot of automotive systems are very locked down as far as what hardware resources to expect/use. For example, if you were to provide less memory, it would error out at th every boot, and if providing more memory, it might error out, or it might just never use the extra memory. This makes sense for automotive and safety related - it cannot be like a PC, which auto-detects what hardware it has and tries its best. Proper automotive systems know exactly what hardware to expect, and throw errors while refusing to operate, if the available hardware differs from what the software has been tested on.

Of course, Porsche's software is definitely not state-of-art, so you might get lucky and it will auto-detect more memory and try to use it. There was a time you could plug-in a mouse and a keyboard to the Tesla USB port and use it on the main infotainment (they locked it out with an update not long after people discovered this feature).

 

[whitex]

Out of curiosity, how much would people be willing to pay for such RAM upgrade? Would $2,000 for doubling the RAM be an acceptable price to upgrade a Porsche?

 

[Murph7355]

Out of curiosity, how much would people be willing to pay for such RAM upgrade? Would $2,000 for doubling the RAM be an acceptable price to upgrade a Porsche?

Depends what the upside would be.

Would these changes be guaranteed to make the system more responsive? I suspect not...

 

[W1NGE]

Out of curiosity, how much would people be willing to pay for such RAM upgrade? Would $2,000 for doubling the RAM be an acceptable price to upgrade a Porsche?

Nope - I don't have or see a need for it. In the old days $2K was the price of the PCM in the first place and $2K for a RAM upgrade (warranty issues etc) is way too expensive IMHO.

 

[whitex]

Depends what the upside would be.

Would these changes be guaranteed to make the system more responsive? I suspect not...

Ha ha, devil is always in the details. Say I tell you yes, the $2,000 upgrade will make the system more responsive on current version of software (cannot guarantee anything on future updates). Yet still, what does that mean? If that means you can have more apps loaded into memory, that will make it more responsive when you call up that app if with less memory it ends up being swapped out of memory. Or maybe I can show that the click response is 1ms faster. Not something most would notice, but hey, it is faster. Bottom line is upgrading memory, if at all possible of course, might or might not make your PCM faster, and that depends on how you use it (how many PCM apps do you typically use simultaneously for example) and your perception (can you notice a 1ms glitch? most people can't. I, having spend years optimizing performance on phones, tablets, etc. can in fact spot 1ms glitches in a video playback, where most people cannot, then again I can also spot a less than 60Hz refresh display, again, most people couldn't).

The only guarantee you could offer from a RAM upgrade is that the current software sees and is able to utilize that RAM. Note I said current software, future software might ignore the extra RAM. ?‍

 

[whitex]

Nope - I don't have or see a need for it. In the old days $2K was the price of the PCM in the first place and $2K for a RAM upgrade (warranty issues etc) is way too expensive IMHO.

Me neither btw. To be honest, I probably have the skillset to attempt such an upgrade with a reasonable chance of success, but it doesn't interest me enough to invest any time into it, or pay $2,000. Heck, I wouldn't pay $500 for such upgrade, but was curious how others value it, since value is always relative to the valuator.

 

[Murph7355]

I'd rather spend the money on improving the software itself.

The speed of it etc is broadly OK, and I'm sure better quality software could also provide performance gains.

If they gave better options as to which settings stayed in memory, better/more flexible control of what can be displayed where, and better control of the system via the steering wheel/driver's display, then we can talk $s ?

 

[chun]

Out of curiosity, how much would people be willing to pay for such RAM upgrade? Would $2,000 for doubling the RAM be an acceptable price to upgrade a Porsche?

2000 to get the infotainment software + CPU from the macan EV; yea; i would pay it. Hell; just getting apple maps on the dash makes that worth for me; as I could ditch PCM 100% after that.

2000 for 50$ worth of ram? If it would actually bring for sure noticeable improvement, maybe. likely not.

The issue I have with the PCM is when starting the car after a long parking period. It takes FOREVER for things to load in and start being decently responsive. So I suspect it's not the RAM that's the issue, but the actual storage itself. And judging by the noise some people report from the PCM, wouldn't be shocked if it's running off of some kind of slow HDD; and the noise is just the disk being written / read like old ass PCs from 2000 HDD noises.

So let's assume it is an HDD; if you could copy all of it's content to a SSD; depending on what connector they use, you could change it to an SSD - even if it might mean going through an adapter. I suspect that would bring much bigger improvement than more ram; similar to old windows machines transitioning from HDD to SSD (i still vividly remember moving my old windows PC from a 7200rpm HDD to a SSD; and windows went from seconds or tens of seconds to open or search for something, to instantly doing it; it was like magic - ignoring that somehow windows search got worse since then ? )

And even if it's not an HDD; i highly doubt the storage is faster than an HDD; so any sort of upgrade to that would be much bigger improvement, in my opinion

EDIT: I will actually back this up by pointing out that 911, Panamera, Macan & Cayenne manufactured in 2019 were equipped with a 100GB sata 2.5 inch HDD drive located at the top of the unit; and some people on the other forum have upgrade that one to SSDs. I have yet to see someone attempt it on a Taycan

 

[chun]

On the possible HDD upgrade:

Also this interesting tidbit related to 2019 911 models:

The PCM system unlike a regular PC does not boot from HDD. All of the essential software is within the PCM3.1 internal flash memory. What the HDD has is a bunch of apps like a custom browser and utilities

Steps people follow to upgrade HDD to SSD on 2019 Porsche models (not taycan)

So if you are going to simply replace/upgrade a working drive as preventative maintenance, you would do the following:

• Make sure you have a computer that you can attach SATA drives to (most modern computers can handle sata, or you can get usb and power adapters.)
• Get a Sata SSD larger than the capacity in your existing PCM. (
  Amazon
  )
• Get Clonezilla Live on a bootable USB drive (https://clonezilla.org/)
• Remove your hard drive from your PCM
  • Remove PCM fuse, or disconnect battery (I pull the fuse)
  • Remove side panels from center tunnel (pop off starting from the rear)
  • Remove screws holding PCM in place (T25 bit)
  • The PCM should now be free to slide forward. You may try and slide it forward enough to just remove the hard drive, or attempt to remove the unit entirely - either one is fiddly.
  • The hard drive is at the top of the PCM. Remove the two T8 screws and pry the back of the drive tray up and out of the PCM. Unplug the ribbon connector from the back of the drive, NOT from the PCM end.
• Attach the drive you just removed and the new drive to your PC
• Insert your Clonezilla bootable USB drive into your PC and boot/reboot to start Clonezilla
  • You may have to go into the bios and change the boot order so that your pc will boot from usb
• Run Clonezilla, chose to clone from device to device, select the source drive (from PCM) and the destination (new SSD)
  • The cloning process will take about 45 minutes to an hour, so don't worry if it seems like it's going slow.
• When cloning is complete, shut down the computer, remove the drives, and re-install the new drive into your PCM.
• I recommend testing the unit before you button everything back up. Just plug the fuse back in and ensure your PCM is working, then put everything back together.
  • I also have a bench top method. If you have a spare car battery, you can hook up the PCM to power and ground and run it on your bench. Obviously, anything that needs an antenna won't work, but you will be able to conduct basic functions and verify the unit is working correctly.

 

[Fantasmos]

On my Panamera using PCM 3.1 they had the OS on a HDD. Migrated and upgraded it to an SSD greatly increased the performance of the system, I've had zero crashes. For me it was very easy because I work in IT. Still keep the old disk as a backup.

Meanwhile on the forums people had units replaced and so on because of the HDD failures. It's doable, depending on whether the module has standard components.

If they are still using HDDs in 2024 that would be atrocious though

 

[chun]

If they are still using HDDs in 2024 that would be atrocious though

Seeing as 911's from 2019 are on HDDs, and the Taycans started production in 2019 also, I find it very possible. I highly doubt they changed the BOM so much for 2020-2024 models. Maybe the face lifted one could be different, as the infotainment is faster.

 

[Jasper4S]

I envy everyone of you ? You all live the perfect life if you want to spend 2k on an upgrade of the computer in your car to make it a little snappier. The world is in crisis with all the problems we have on all continents, but here we are discussing the most useless upgrade ever on a Porsche. Thanks for the laughs.

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