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Aside from the obvious cooling issues people have already mentioned, isn't cosmic radiation also very unkind to modern ultra dense silicon? AIUI they tend to us
by jsheard 1y ago
Aside from the obvious cooling issues people have already mentioned, isn't cosmic radiation also very unkind to modern ultra dense silicon? AIUI they tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason, and even then they have to build in redundant compute to mitigate logic errors that probably wouldn't happen on Earth.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> They tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason. To be fair that's mostly part "if it works don't change it" and part "that's how we've always done it". SpX uses newer hardware w/ traditional OSs (linux) w/ lots of redundancy.
- megiddo 1y agoThis. Had to deal with cosmic rays on earth in data centers 20 years ago. I can't imagine running bleeding edge GPUs in a particle accelerator and getting reasonable results.
- ekianjo 1y agoDoes SpaceX also use old silicon for Starlink and other projects?
- jsheard 1y agoI believe they use relatively modern silicon in Starlink, but the nature of a constellation gives them a lot of wiggle room to route around failures.