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Subject: Intel 286 chips for F22
Vulture    10/24/2002 9:45:29 AM
The Pentagon is subsidizing manufacture of outdated chips.
They only have to go to Ebay and suchlike to RECYCLE all those old motherboards that people have.
 
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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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jlb    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   12/14/2003 9:28:24 AM
What would you need an OS for?
 
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denheer    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   12/18/2003 11:01:50 AM
In fact, base code that controls something can be called an OS. What you probable mean is why use a full blown OS like Windows NT? Of course this has advantages, you can develop faster because there is a clear programming protocol used by millions of people. The disadvantage is of course unknown bugs because of not/rarely used code that's made by a 3rd party (Microsoft in this case). Either way, In a critical application I would NEVER use 3rd party software. Of course the software for Fly-by-wire is already made for several other aircraft. You must be plain stupid not using this tested software as a base for your new aircraft.
 
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brit_view    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   12/18/2003 3:28:59 PM
So if the Raptor is using such primative chips and at the same time it has the power of 9 Cray supercomputers computing 350 million calculations a second that must add up to a lot of chips. . .?
 
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denheer    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   12/19/2003 3:13:03 AM
As I see it, It has never been said the Raptor uses 286 chips for ALL it's computing purposes. Radar, HUD, TADS, etc are much less critical then Fly-by-wire and needs loads of processing power. I think it's a save assumption to say other chips are used for those purposes.
 
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Dancing Johnny    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   12/20/2003 6:15:20 PM
You don't need superfast processing power to opererate most military or industrial hardware. And Microsoft has probably never written a single line of code for said hardware. Most of this code is written by the contractor and then burned on ROM or EPROM type chips. I'm no expert on Fly-by-wire systems (my last aircraft was 60's tech), but I would say that such aircraft use a number of different type proccessors, some will be less powerfull but more rugged than others. And remember, unlike a computer simulation, a real aircraft isn't having to use its computers to create a simulated world (which takes a lot of computing power). It just needs to to take inputs from its sensors and display that info to the pilot. I do think that the Situaltional Display of the F-22 will need a fair amount of computing power, but nothing in the way of today's P4 is needed.
 
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leoatwork    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   4/23/2004 4:31:22 PM
You might find this interesting; link it shows how good software can be if it's done right.
 
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rbrooku    RE:Intel 286 chips for F22   5/4/2004 2:30:03 AM
The reason for 286 class chips is that most airforce software is 16 bit assembler code that started in the early eighties. If I remember, milstd 1750 was the standard designed by committee, and most of the subroutines for fast signal processing, fly-by-wire and so on were written and laboriously tested and debugged. In fact, needlessly complicating these routines just to run them on faster chips could be dangerous. Which gives you some idea how fast todays cheap desktops really are. Mostly, all the new processing power of todays pc's goes for things like multimedia, graphics and a bit of data crunching.
 
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