What's the Best Computing Architecture for the Autonomous Car?

As the autonomous car evolves, automakers face a complex question: How to enable self-driving cars to process massive amounts of data and then come to logical and safe conclusions about it. Today, most automakers accomplish that with a distributed form of data processing. That is, they place intelligence at the sensors. More recently, though, that's begun to change. Many engineers now favor a more centralized form of data processing, in which simple sensors send raw unprocessed data to a powerful central processor, which does all the "thinking."