Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU
81 points
3 hours ago
| 5 comments
| cpushack.com
| HN
haunter
1 hour ago
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And if you are curious about the modern radiation hardened CPUs then the current state of the art ones are the MOOG BRE440 [0] and the BAE RAD5500 [1], 5545 [2] being the highest performance multi core one.

Even more interesting that they both use the IBM POWER architecture!

0, https://www.moog.com/products/avionics/spacecraft-avionics/b...

1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500

2, https://web.archive.org/web/20190226111129/https://www.baesy...

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kjs3
1 hour ago
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There have been a number of rad-hard SPARC chips from different vendors tthat have flown along the way, and I know Frontgrade/Gaisler currently sells a SPARC v8 version, which isn't that far behind the 'state of the art' as the e5500 based PPCs from BEA (at least as far as state of the art in space rated, rad-hard processors goes...it's a conservative market). Quite a few rad-hard ARMs out there farther down the performance curve.

Frontgrade also advertises a rad-hard RISC-V, as does Microchip (a PIC64 variant), that I know nothing about, but seems like an inevitable next step. Seems like you could grab some Xilinx rad-hard FPGA and bobs your uncle.

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NooneAtAll3
39 minutes ago
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what scale of radiation do such hardened designs target?
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haunter
22 minutes ago
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1 Megarad (10 Kilogray)

In comparison radtherapy patients get 20 gray in 1-2 weeks so it's the 20/10000 = 0.02% of what these designs target

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fred_is_fred
57 minutes ago
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Wow, until you posted this I thought Moog was just a synthesizer company. And a bit of an odd one at that based on how I saw that synth presented.
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wbl
42 minutes ago
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Cousins. One made synths the other flight controls.
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kjs3
1 hour ago
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Interesting combination of 'remarkable' and 'wtf' that we fling nuclear weapons around with the computational equivalent of a couple of TRS-80s[1]. I can only imagine the sighs of relief from the devs when things like the MIL-STD-1750a and later rad-hard SPARC and PPC variants came along.

[1] yes...I know the TRS-80 had a z80, not an 8085. Close enough.

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Arodex
1 hour ago
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You don't need much calculation power to manage a 30-min ballistic trajectory.

The inertial navigation system is the very crazy part, along with the nuclear fusion warhead design itself.

https://youtu.be/AazmxNs5kmE?is=2LE2q3rBSWDyTs7j

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kjs3
59 minutes ago
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I was under the impression that the Trident II could do terminal phase maneuvering, so not a straight ballistic trajectory, but fair enough.
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egorfine
1 hour ago
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> Galileo space probe [..] How many IC’s were needed? Over 50,000 for the probe itself, backups, testing chips etc.

I seriously doubt you need to fabricate 50k CPUs for a single space probe, including backups, testing chips, etc.

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patentatt
13 minutes ago
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I assume the tooling and process are such that it’s a one-time thing, as in, this is the most of these chips that we could ever possibly need for all time. They’re not going to be able to spin up the same fab and build the same chips the same way again in the future whether that’s 5 or 50 years in the future. Given the long lifespans of military systems, it’s maybe not so crazy.
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Zenst
1 hour ago
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That number was probably shaped by minimum production-run requirements, alongside the need for software development units, along with other factors, like the use in Trident II and other quests we may not know about.
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api
1 hour ago
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> other quests we may not know about.

Back then an interface between terrestrial computer systems and a Zeta Reticulan spacecraft required a small supercomputer on our side.

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TheJoeMan
37 minutes ago
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I also am curious about that statement. Seems something got mixed up between the quantity of the full run and the quantity for the probe.
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grosswait
1 hour ago
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Very interesting! Definitely some jargon I’ve not come across before.

“The chips were made on a n-on-n+ epitaxial substrate to provide latchup control, extensive guard rings around transistors were used and hardened oxides”

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anonymous_user9
1 hour ago
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This is slop, but perhaps the old-fashioned kind.

> An 8085 processor that could handle 1×106 rads of radiation with only a 25% reduction in performance, and 3×106 rads with a 40% drop.

Hmm, from where did they copy-paste this mangled scientific notation?

Ah here we are, pg. 37 (46 in PDF file): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA063902.pdf

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egorfine
1 hour ago
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Excellent find. And yes, obviously this is slop. 106 rad is exactly nothing for nuclear usage.
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dpark
1 minute ago
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Yeah, but 318 should probably suffice.
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ralferoo
46 minutes ago
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Bad typesetting just indicates poor editing, not slop IMHO.

I guessed after about a second of thought that this actually meant 10^6. If I had to guess how this happened, somebody just wrote their prose in Word with the 6 in superscript and cut and paste it into HTML which lost the formatting.

EDIT: seems I'm being downvoted for this comment. I think it's a shame if you consider the whole article (which I personally found very interesting) as slop because of 2 incorrectly formatted numbers that could easily result from a cut-and-paste error. It's clear the article hadn't been well proof read as there are a number of spelling mistakes too, but that doesn't make the content itself slop.

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