>Having four different SoCs for different functions seems reasonable?
Not having different physical machines for different functions is sort of the entire reason computers exist. Having 30 CPUs to drive a robot through a parking lot when we landed on the moon with like five IBM System/4 Pis, yes that is ridiculous. That Astro robot should have used hardware that costs 200 bucks
Boy do I have some surprise for you about a modern car…An older modern car has about 4 ECUs. Usually with multiple SoCs in each ECU either for FuSa reasons or performance reasons. Comparing a modern consumer product with the Apollo 11 machine is illogical. The Apollo compute system had a ton of custom analog circuits (understandably so). Loading hacker news which is predominantly text based requires more memory than what they had in the main compute module (4 kB).
Your usb-c to HDMI dongle has more processing power than the computer we used to get to the moon, at a millionth the size. Computing power used to get to moon is maybe not a useful unit of computing to compare things to. If you think you could make the same robot but with a BOM of $200, and severely undercut Amazon, you could do a Kickstarter and make a bunch of money.
> we landed on the moon with like five IBM System/4 Pis,
...and the largest rocket ever built. Once you have that, the computer is really a sideshow, as opposed to a robot that is mostly a thin veneer around the computer.
Not having different physical machines for different functions is sort of the entire reason computers exist. Having 30 CPUs to drive a robot through a parking lot when we landed on the moon with like five IBM System/4 Pis, yes that is ridiculous. That Astro robot should have used hardware that costs 200 bucks