The Half-Full, Half-Empty Eurofighter Glass, Too

[Colonel Olrik]

Military embedded systems need to operate in much more hostile environments - heat, EM interference, nuclear SREE/EMP effects and who-knows-what. They need to be much more reliable.

That explains much of the delay in adopting new technology. Military grade computation hardware is serious business, and has a development/expected life cycle of its own. And it's damn resistant with processors still working and outputting data during and after unexpected and awesomely explosive rocket malfunctions.

Why would it need more anyway? It doesn't need to push around 5 billion triangles or post-process icons; I imagine most of what it does is networking and geometry, which is simple stuff.

Hm, no. Control algorithms that maintain system stability at Mach speeds for any pilot demand are not simple stuff. You need predictive algorithms, and for that you have n-dimensional look up tables that account for temperatures, angles, speed, remaining fuel mass, altitude, and so on (it leads to n being a big number, which is crap when there are memory limitations) and the necessity to run complex simulations quickly. These are only a few examples.

[Darth Wong]

Vot? I remember still using 5.25" floppies in elementary school, in the early 90s. I remember reinstalling win3.1 from a whole bunch of 5.25" floppies.

Schools didn't always have the latest stuff, especially back then, when computers in schools were still new and untrusted by many educators.

I worked at IBM in 1988 and they were shifting to 3.5" floppies. Obviously they would be ahead of the curve on that because of who they are, but it was already common knowledge that the 5.25" floppy's days were numbered by then.

[phongn]

Military embedded systems need to operate in much more hostile environments - heat, EM interference, nuclear SREE/EMP effects and who-knows-what. They need to be much more reliable.

That explains much of the delay in adopting new technology. Military grade computation hardware is serious business, and has a development/expected life cycle of its own. And it's damn resistant with processors still working and outputting data during and after unexpected and awesomely explosive rocket malfunctions.

Spaceflight has its own interesting demands - if I recall, the fastest radiation-hardened CPU is something like a 200MHz PowerPC 750.

Hm, no. Control algorithms that maintain system stability at Mach speeds for any pilot demand are not simple stuff. You need predictive algorithms, and for that you have n-dimensional look up tables that account for temperatures, angles, speed, remaining fuel mass, altitude, and so on (it leads to n being a big number, which is crap when there are memory limitations) and the necessity to run complex simulations quickly. These are only a few examples.

For that matter, robust networking is not compute-trivial, either.

[Void]

Hilarious, so in an attempt to save money they axed every feature that gave it a leg up on the legions of far cheaper American and Russian fighters thus making the whole program essentially pointless and an enormous waste of money.

[Decue]

Hilarious, so in an attempt to save money they axed every feature that gave it a leg up on the legions of far cheaper American and Russian fighters thus making the whole program essentially pointless and an enormous waste of money.

They will probably add at least some of that stuff in future upgrades, we do it in Sweden all the time