News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by xupybd on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @06:15AM (#35872123)
They didn't talk about radiation hardening. Is this chip safe to use in space? I thought a chip that dense would be vulnerable to cosmic rays?
Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @07:08AM (#35872537)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

> Ingenuity, also called Ginny, is a small robotic helicopter operating on Mars.

> The helicopter uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor

Edit: There is a way to detect and recover from these types of errors. They appear to be able to run the computation on a number of cores with a voter to check for consistency.

Slide 41 (PDF warning): http://microelectronics.esa.int/riscv/rvws2022/presentations...

Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by sjburt on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @09:52AM (#35874319)
Ingenuity had a Snapdragon, but there was also a redundant pair of arm r5f microcontrollers (which are also lockstepped dual-core processors, so quadruple redundancy) where the flight controllers were, and a rad-tolerant FPGA (proasic) that watchdogged everything else. The Snapdragon was used for less critical code such as imaging and comms.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by Symmetry on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @11:29AM (#35875865)
Also, thanks to the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field Mars's surface is about 50 times more radioactive than the Earth's, but it's still no as bad as space out past the Van Allen belts
Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by EuropeOverlords on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @08:36AM (#35873434)
joke : They do not have to care about error every 67 billionth callculation that much, AI is hallucinating enough.
Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by _a_a_a_ on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @01:41PM (#35877831)
Lord Almighty, take a guess whether a space agency designing a chip for use in space might consider these things.
Re:432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Sp... by xupybd on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @03:31PM (#35879289)
I'm asking for more information on how it's going to operate in a high radiation environment. I'm not assuming they haven't considered the problem.