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Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

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Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#41

Post by dahinds »

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

If this was copy-pasted, isn't it much more likely that it was copy-pasted from a document describing the performance of the SA3000 chip, than from a document that was written before the SA3000 was developed?

The only overlap from the document with the text you quote is the "106", which is a pretty common mis-formatting issue.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#42

Post by ricksunny »

api wrote: post #9
Zenst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number was probably shaped by minimum production-run requirements, alongside the need for software development units, along with other factors, like the use in Trident II and other quests we may not know about.

> other quests we may not know about. Back then an interface between terrestrial computer systems and a Zeta Reticulan spacecraft required a small supercomputer on our side.

Wait for 99% of HN to totally not get the context of this

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#43

Post by annzabelle »

palmotea wrote: post #32

> Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). We need more of this kind of thing, generally: government agencies building up in-house technical capability, instead of outsourcing everything to contractors. For instance: there should be a government-…

Sandia is not in house government, it is an FFRDC or federally funded research and development center, which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts. Think faster hiring/firing and higher pay than government, but longer term funding and goals than contractors. All the national labs are FFRDCs and there are a few others.

My dad worked for one for decades - the MITRE corporation, which is a nonprofit, and interestingly enough got the first .org domain. They also run CVE, and do a variety of R&D and legacy systems work, most notably air traffic control. They also entered vehicles in the DARPA challenges in the aughts, though did not do well.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#44

Post by jandrewrogers »

switchbak wrote: post #34
jandrewrogers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even hypersonic weapons with precision terminal guidance use truly ancient CPUs. Physics limits of molecular materials places a very low upper bound on the amount of compute required. The rate at which an object in the physical world can alter its trajectory is ultimately limited by the strength of molecular bonds in the material it is made from. Exceed that limit and the object will disintegrate. This upper bound is…

I imagine you're correct about course correction speed, although I'd also expect that the materials and their properties are quite classified at present. I would also imagine that there could be processing necessary that is mostly unrelated to manoeuvering speed (inlet/control surface management, etc). Perhaps some hypersonic experts could weigh in and let us know :)

The theoretical limits of materials science is undergrad chemistry. Among other things, the bond energy between atoms in a molecule tells you how much energy is required to break them. The strongest possible bond is less than 3x the energy of the ubiquitous carbon-carbon bond of organic chemistry. There is a bit more to it than this e.g. the lattice structure also matters, but you get the gist. You can specify an energy that is not particularly high that is known to exceed that required to destroy all molecular materials.

Real materials are considerably worse than theoretical and you also have to optimize for other properties. The classified part is often more about the processes for fabricating specific materials. This can be extremely non-obvious and difficult.

All the exposed surfaces of a hypersonic missile are themselves limited by material physics. A major problem in hypersonic research was material surfaces degrading so quickly that they lose precision of control. The CPU can send commands but the physical materials of the guidance system don't respond in a reliable way due to the material degradation.

Fun problems.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#45

Post by userbinator »

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.

The Apollo missions to the Moon didn't need much computational power either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#46

Post by mikepalmer »

dahart wrote: post #27
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.

On the flip side, the fact that those processors were enough to steer spacecraft make me feel like there’s also a decent amount of remarkable wtf in how much compute we have now and how little we get out of each instruction on average compared to what people were doing with these z80 equivalents.

on the other hand, now we have claude mythos... which is wtf returns even for a very large number of instructions...

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#47

Post by wojciii »

api wrote: post #9
Zenst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number was probably shaped by minimum production-run requirements, alongside the need for software development units, along with other factors, like the use in Trident II and other quests we may not know about.

> other quests we may not know about. Back then an interface between terrestrial computer systems and a Zeta Reticulan spacecraft required a small supercomputer on our side.

The Asgard?

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#48

Post by palmotea »

annzabelle wrote: post #43
palmotea wrote: post #32

> Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). We need more of this kind of thing, generally: government agencies building up in-house technical capability, instead of outsourcing everything to contractors. For instance: there should be a government-…

Sandia is not in house government, it is an FFRDC or federally funded research and development center, which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts. Think faster hiring/firing and higher pay than government, but longer term funding and goals than contractors. All the national labs are FFRDCs and the…

> ...which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts.

And I guess when I said "government agencies" I was being too specific. What I really mean is government should build up government-controlled technical capability, which could be "weird quasi governmental entities," state-owned businesses, government agencies themselves, or some combination. Pretty much anything, just as long as it's not a privately-owned business entity.

Re: Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

#49

Post by pseudohadamard »

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…

Current state-of-the-art rad-hard CPUs are made by AMD, Intel, and IBM, among others. Their server-grade CPUs have so much error resilience and protection in them that they would have been export-controlled rad-hard devices twenty to thirty years ago.
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