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Fascinating article on how CPUs and memory designed to be used in space are built around old technology running at slow clock speeds (larger transistors = less likely to be interfered by radiation).

The current state of the art space-hardened hardware (which was also used on the Curiosity rover) is a CPU based on the PowerPC 750 (Pentium II era) that runs at 200MHz with 256MB of RAM and 2GB of SSD. It's pretty much impervious to cosmic rays and any radiation it would encounter in space or on other planets.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11 ... nto-space/

That's interesting.

I had always wondered about this myself. It pretty much followed my supposition, but I liked the detail they went into on this. It is sad that what's really holding space silicone back is just that it's not worth the effort.