One of the tradeoffs of radiation hardening is increased transistor size.

Cost-wise it also makes sense - it’s a specialized, certified and low-volume part.

And to be clear, I love power chips. I remain very bullish about the architecture. But as a taxpayer reading this shit just pisses me off. Pork-fat designed to look pro-humanity.

Citation needed

> much less hiring fucking IBM

It's an IBM designed processor, what are you talking about?!

Ha! What's special about rad-hard chips is that they're old designs. You need big geometries to survive cosmic rays, and new chips all have tiny geometries.

So there are two solutions:

1. Find a warehouse full of 20-year old chips.

2. Build a fab to produce 20-year old designs.

Both approaches are used, and both approaches are expensive. (Approach 1 is expensive because as you eventually run out of chips they become very, very valuable and you end up having to build a fab anyway.)

There's more to it than just big geometries but that's a major part of the solution.