Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen...
by nickpsecurity on Monday May 02, 2016 @06:09PM
(#11616116)
Not to mention the old i960's had advanced segmentation and error handling vs common RISC due to BiiN project requirements. I really wish i960 got traction and updates to modern nodes as my security engineering work would've been soooo much easief than x86 bullshit.
Like you said, though, they can be emulated or replaced with PPC if necessary. I encourage someone to emulate i960 anyway given it was badass enough to deserve at least one FPGA clone. :)
This processing capacity could be replaced with a couple of high density MILSPEC FPGAs. Its likely they'd use a 64-bit PowerPC processor augmented by FPGAs. The combined solution would be flexible and probably offer 1000x what the F-22 (Block 5 airframe) went into service, at a fraction the cost of the CIP [1]
As for the reference to the $100 smartphone, the latest "$100" smartphones could probably handle MegaPixel cameras for Augmented Reality and with connected sensors, more commonly known as "Sensor Fusion" [2]
Note: A failure of a $100 smartphone doesn't usually result in a pilot pulling the ejection handles on a $185m (unit cost) fighter. Avionics has to meet higher standards. There are MILSPEC versions of some of these processors. FPGAs are available with MILSPEC qualification.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960#i960_variants
[1] http://www.f22fighter.com/avionics.htm#2.1 Common Integrated Processor (CIP)
[2] http://www.f22fighter.com/avionics.htm#4.0 Software