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Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

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Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#11

Post by Arodex »

kjs3 wrote: post #5

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.

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

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#12

Post by kjs3 »

Arodex wrote: post #11
kjs3 wrote: post #5

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.

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

I was under the impression that the Trident II could do terminal phase maneuvering, so not a straight ballistic trajectory, but fair enough.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#13

Post by fred_is_fred »

haunter wrote: post #2

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/20190…

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.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#14

Post by ralferoo »

egorfine wrote: post #6
anonymous_user9 wrote: post #4

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

Excellent find. And yes, obviously this is slop. 106 rad is exactly nothing for nuclear usage.

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.

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.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#15

Post by wbl »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #13
haunter wrote: post #2

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/20190…

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.

Cousins. One made synths the other flight controls.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#16

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

haunter wrote: post #2

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/20190…

what scale of radiation do such hardened designs target?

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#17

Post by TheJoeMan »

egorfine wrote: post #7

> 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.

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.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#18

Post by haunter »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #16
haunter wrote: post #2

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/20190…

what scale of radiation do such hardened designs target?

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

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#19

Post by patentatt »

egorfine wrote: post #7

> 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.

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.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#20

Post by dpark »

egorfine wrote: post #6
anonymous_user9 wrote: post #4

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

Excellent find. And yes, obviously this is slop. 106 rad is exactly nothing for nuclear usage.

Yeah, but 318 should probably suffice.
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