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Can you imagine a future where we get so used to producing microprocessors this way for so long that another consideration for long-distance space travel become
by therein 11y ago
Can you imagine a future where we get so used to producing microprocessors this way for so long that another consideration for long-distance space travel becomes "but will the CPU still work when the rover gets there"?
- sbierwagen 11y agoPresumably Intel is having electromigration problems with their chips because the feature size is so small-- 14nm. Space hardware tends to use rad-hard chips, which use bigger transistors. Curiosity apparently uses the RAD750, which has a 150nm feature size, and can be clocked up to a blistering 200MHz.
- snuxoll 11y agoTo me this is more worrying for GPU's at future process nodes. Most modern video games push my i5-4570 to reasonable levels, but my R9 290 uses over 3X the power (and generates 3X the heat). If electromigration is much more prominent due to feature size we could see GPU's dying a lot faster than CPU's.
- Animats 11y agoAnd costs a blistering $200K. The US applies export controls to radiation-hardened ICs, which has resulted in a dearth of rad-hard ICs. Nobody wants to run a silicon on sapphire fab any more.