A $50 million contract for a next-generation processor for use in space has been awarded(opens in new tab) to Microchip Technology Inc. of Chandler, Arizona. The firm, which makes embedded microcontrollers and Arm-based 32bit systems, will design and deliver the HPSC (High-Performance Spaceflight Computing(opens in new tab)) processor over three years.
Next Space Computer , The new processor is expected to provide at least 100 times the computational capacity of current spaceflight computers. While this may sound like a boast, the current state of space computing means it’s definitely not out of reach. NASA’s Orion reusable capsule uses a Honeywell flight computer originally built for use in Boeing 787 airliners — a system that was 12 years old at the time of its launch in 2014. The point of spaceflight computers is not that they are particularly fast, but that they are reliable and fault-tolerant. The Hubble space Telescope’s original DF-224 computer, built in the 1980s, was a triple-CPU design 18in square that weighed 110lbs. It was augmented with a 16MHz Intel 386 in 1993, and the whole thing was replaced by a single 25MHz Intel 486 in 2000, while the world was being wowed by the Pentium 4. The Mars rovers, by contrast, carry IBM processors not dissimilar to the Apple G3 (though nobody ever radiation-hardened a Powerbook). “Our current spaceflight computers were developed almost 30 years ago,” said Wesley Powell, NASA’s principal technologist for advanced avionics. “While they have served past missions well, future NASA missions demand significantly increased onboard computing capabilities and reliability. The new computing processor will provide the advances required in performance, fault tolerance, and flexibility to meet these future mission needs.”
Source: This news is originally published by Tomshardware