2015 Hyundai Genesis Sedan: Android, Atom, And More

Standard Android Infotainment

The standard infotainment unit on the Genesis sedan is what Hyundai calls AVN 4.5. On the Genesis, the system is highlighted by an 8-inch touch screen display. Resolution of the display is a typical 800x480, which is adequate from the driver’s seat. Though it’s a resistive touch screen, it's still fairly responsive, and totally suitable for automotive use.

Originally, this story reflected a guess that the SoC was a Freescale i.MX 6Dual. We’ve since discovered it’s a custom order i.MX53 family SoC clocked at 1 GHz instead of the 800 MHz of the standard i.MX534/536. The i.MX53 family is an evolution of the i.MX51 used in Ford SYNC, albeit with energy efficiency improvements, support for DDR3, larger memory capacities, and other performance tweaks.

At the heart of the i.MX53 is a single ARM Cortex-A9 core with 256KB of L2 cache. A NEON coprocessor is installed, most likely aids voice recognition features of the Genesis sedan. Single-core SoCs may not seem as fast or sexy as the latest quad or even octa-core ones used in smartphones and tablets, but they do the job well for specialized single-use applications.

Graphics processing for the i.MX53 family is provided by an Imageon Z460 graphics core originally designed by AMD, but has since been purchased by Qualcomm and renamed Adreno. The graphics core is ancient by today’s standards, but still has unified shaders and support for OpenGL ES 2.0. It won’t tear up 3D benchmarks but is perfectly adequate for the simple user interface needs of an automotive infotainment system.

The most interesting bit of the Hyundai AVN 4.5 system is the use of a Linux-based operating system, which is actually Android. Hyundai heavily skins the OS for infotainment use, so it bears no resemblance to your typical Android smartphone or tablet. We were not provided with the specific version of Android, but predict that it's 2.3 Gingerbread since that falls in line with the vehicle’s development cycle.

Hyundai installs 16 GB of flash memory on the AVN 4.5, and provides users with 6,544 MB of free storage for music and images. The remaining space is partitioned off, with 164 MB for boot, 300 MB for the system, 5,120 MB for apps and backups, 500 MB for updates, 100 MB for debugging, and a whopping 2,150 MB for voice recognition.

Unfortunately, Hyundai did not have any vehicles with AVN 4.5 on hand for the launch event. We did briefly play with AVN 4.5 at CES 2014 and found it responsive. It also features Aha Radio and Pandora app support, too.