6 ms·

It's been built but not delivered as its waiting for upgrades. One of the upgrades is the computer - which I had never thought about before. What platform does

It's been built but not delivered as its waiting for upgrades. One of the upgrades is the computer - which I had never thought about before. What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Turns out it's a custom CPU/GPU developed by L3Harris [1] running the Green hills Integrity real time OS [2]. It's unsurprising that it's all super custom hardware and software for military use, but conceptually it's like alternative universe of computing. I wonder what it's like to work with. 1. https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-integrated-core-processor-icp https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-i... 2. https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html

geoduck14 3y ago
>What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Pretty sure it isn't Windows CE, but I'm not 100% certain
Arrath 3y ago
> What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use? Generally speaking, something older than you might suspect. For instance, while the F-35 officially entered service with various branches of the US armed forces as early as 2015, its first flight was in 2006. The experimental plane first flew in 2000, and the earliest design work began in 1995. Not that the compute/avionics hardware is ever truly locked into stone considering the successive F-35 production Blocks with both iterative software and hardware upgrades that have already been fielded, Service Life Extension Programs that the plane will receive in coming decades, and so on, but expect at least some of the silicon in there to share more with a Pentium 3 than a Ryzen 7.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Wow, 4.5 kW of power draw max for a server with 512 MB of memory and the equivalent computer power of a single x86 core from about 25 years ago! I’m pretty sure an Arduino could run circles around that thing, using a battery.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so many errors the watchdog hw would shutdown your newly acquired paperweight.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.
    - dralley 3y ago
      It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
A lot of military silicon is, in microarchitectural terms, very old. People overestimate how much CPU is required. For example, reliable hypersonic kinetic intercept of hypersonic targets (i.e. the proverbial bullet shooting down another bullet, where both are hypersonic) can be, and has been, done all day with a MIPS R3000 CPU. The physical limits of materials restrict systems to much lower reaction times than even ancient CPUs are capable of. The advantage of old CPUs is that you can harden the hell out of them and be made to have very predictable properties. Also, the CPUs tend to be for orchestration and control. If you need any kind of heavy exotic processing, there is a dedicated piece of silicon for that purpose. Complex US weapon systems like the F35 are a mixture of silicon that was old before some people here were born and state-of-the-art beyond what is available in commodity systems. They generally use the oldest most reliable tech that won’t compromise requirements for any particular use case.

geoduck14 3y ago

>What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Pretty sure it isn't Windows CE, but I'm not 100% certain

Arrath 3y ago

> What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use? Generally speaking, something older than you might suspect. For instance, while the F-35 officially entered service with various branches of the US armed forces as early as 2015, its first flight was in 2006. The experimental plane first flew in 2000, and the earliest design work began in 1995. Not that the compute/avionics hardware is ever truly locked into stone considering the successive F-35 production Blocks with both iterative software and hardware upgrades that have already been fielded, Service Life Extension Programs that the plane will receive in coming decades, and so on, but expect at least some of the silicon in there to share more with a Pentium 3 than a Ryzen 7.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Wow, 4.5 kW of power draw max for a server with 512 MB of memory and the equivalent computer power of a single x86 core from about 25 years ago! I’m pretty sure an Arduino could run circles around that thing, using a battery.

grepfru_it 3y ago
Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so many errors the watchdog hw would shutdown your newly acquired paperweight.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.
  - dralley 3y ago
    It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.

jandrewrogers 3y ago

A lot of military silicon is, in microarchitectural terms, very old. People overestimate how much CPU is required. For example, reliable hypersonic kinetic intercept of hypersonic targets (i.e. the proverbial bullet shooting down another bullet, where both are hypersonic) can be, and has been, done all day with a MIPS R3000 CPU. The physical limits of materials restrict systems to much lower reaction times than even ancient CPUs are capable of. The advantage of old CPUs is that you can harden the hell out of them and be made to have very predictable properties. Also, the CPUs tend to be for orchestration and control. If you need any kind of heavy exotic processing, there is a dedicated piece of silicon for that purpose. Complex US weapon systems like the F35 are a mixture of silicon that was old before some people here were born and state-of-the-art beyond what is available in commodity systems. They generally use the oldest most reliable tech that won’t compromise requirements for any particular use case.