Intel 286 chips for F22

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fred79 RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 3/20/2003 9:55:20 PM

why. if you don't need to process that much information why would you spend good muney to produce special chips for no good reason. if a proven design like a 286 does all the processing power you need then why would you upgrade. don't forgett teh biggest need for fsater and faster chip sets is not because of the need to process more information than teh 286 did but to handle teh amazing ineffeicentcies of the modern GUI operating system. when your not creating a nice display you don't need that much processing power.

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neye_eve RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 3/23/2003 10:38:48 PM

No need to use a power-hungry and less-proven chip if an older, completely mature chip will do. That having been said, there was the rather unfortunate event of the Navy ship going dead-in-the-water, so to speak. That was running a version of NT or Win2k. If the former is the case, it would be needing at least a 385. If the latter is the case (win2k), it would require at least a pentium (class) chip.

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fred79 RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 3/24/2003 11:50:56 AM

i can only say that if the US navy is using windows based operating systems to run ship systems we are all in big frickin trouble. windows even the server based programs are so ineffecient compared to a directly designe system that it could make a huge difference in processing speed and crash prevention. not many people have ever in thier life seen DOS crash and it is even less likely that a completely mature self written system would fail and more than DOS. also useing windows based operating systems would result in the need for much more and more expesive computer equiptment.

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neye_eve here's the link (re: Navy Ship running windows) 3/24/2003 3:08:10 PM

Yeah, you'd think they'd use a real-time OS like those found in satelites or pacemakers. I have no idea how things have changed in the last 4.5 years, but here's the link about the dead-in-the-water ship due to a windows NT glitch. link here's a quote from it: "Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in reducing manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy began running shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that fewer sailors would be needed to control key ship functions. But the Navy last fall learned a difficult lesson about automation: The very information technology on which the ships depend also makes them vulnerable. The Yorktown last September suffered a systems failure when bad data was fed into its computers during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Va. The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk." (end quote - However, IIRC, this was caused by, of all things - a simple division by zero error! - I don't have a source on that one)

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foobar67 RE:here's the link (re: Navy Ship running windows) 10/20/2003 3:50:53 PM

I'm pretty sure that they're running some kind of 386 CPU's. They're available with extended temp ranges. ftp://download.intel.com/design/shared/embedded_linecards.pdf You start with a reliable CPU and design your systems accordingly. Imagine all the retesting and documentation costs associated with a cpu upgrade. That would really cost billions, not to mention all the excessive heat generated by modern cpu's. Plus nobody would imagine to install an OS into a 386 system that would require Ctrl-Alt-Del ;) foobar67

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arodrig6 RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 11/7/2003 9:32:44 AM

Remember, we got to the moon using less processing power than an Apple II. :-) low-end x86 chips are still quite popular for embedded applications. In terms of number of parts sold, Intel still probably ships more 286, 386, and 486 parts than Pentiums.

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bombard RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 11/25/2003 12:33:23 PM

Re: Pentiums in fighters: And some lucky begger gets a bit of shrapnel in your fan, and boom! no more computing power. re: Yorktown, someone put a 0 in place of an interger, and it somehow shut the engines, then firecontrol and navigation. Dont ask me how they did it. I dont trust Microsoft.

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DocK RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 11/29/2003 1:16:17 PM

When the electronic design of the F-22 was 'frozen', the 286 was state of the art. You have to freeze the electronics so other contractors can develop missiles, radars, etc. within a known environment. Just as in software development, it is the certification process that takes all of the time. The longest, as I understand it, is anything going into space that carries people. I am surprised that they use even 286?s in their computers, but I?ve no reason to doubt that claim. The F-22 was developed in the 1980?s, and is nearing the end a 30 year design & development cycle, which I understand is about the norm these days.

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vfrickey RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 12/2/2003 7:00:29 PM

Not only was the 286 the state of the art when F-22 avionics were established, but rad-hardness of computer chips falls sharply with the number of diodes per unit area. F-22 is actually high-tech for a weapons system - I remember in the late 1980s that mil-spec, "rad-hard" systems were closer to 8080 and Z80 specs than 80286. At that time, B52s were flying with vacuum-tube avionics because there were no solid-state equivalents which could tolerate the EMP created when the US and USSR were using up all their nuclear weapons at once.

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vfrickey RE:Intel 286 chips for F22 12/2/2003 7:19:39 PM

"windows even the server based programs are so ineffecient compared to a directly designe system that it could make a huge difference in processing speed and crash prevention. not many people have ever in thier life seen DOS crash and it is even less likely that a completely mature self written system would fail and more than DOS." The problem is that multitasking and object-oriented code (not necessarily a Windows-like GUI) are needed to fly aircraft with the essentially unstable aerodynamic characteristics required of modern fighter and attack aircraft - either that, or many, many CPU's, one embedded in each control system on the aircraft. I don't have a high enough security clearance to say what would be better :-) There's another downside to all the computing horses needed for modern fighters - Boeing lost the Joint Strike Fighter competition to Lockheed Martin partly because of a programmers' strike during the competition - funny looking guys and girls were marching in front of Boeing/Mc Donnell Douglas with signs like "No Nerds, No Birds." And sure enough, the nerds didn't get back to work fast enough for Boeing to sell any JSF birds. Software is just as important to a modern fighter as ordnance or target acquisition hardware.

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