
MIPS in Space: Inside NASA’s New Horizons Mission to Pluto - alexvoica
http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-in-space-inside-nasa-new-horizons-mission-to-pluto
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randsp
The hardening argument seems disturbing to me giving the achievements that
SpaceX have done in a short time. Apparently SpaceX is using some sort of
redundancy system
([https://lwn.net/Articles/540368/](https://lwn.net/Articles/540368/)) to
avoid all the hardening stuff enabling them to use more powerful and COTS
hardware that NASA or ESA.

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rjsw
... or the COTS hardware is reliable enough in Low Earth Orbit.

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david-given
Low Earth Orbit is under the Van Allen belts, and so is shielded from a lot of
the radiation of the inner solar system.

The outer solar system is dead quiet and quite safe... but of course you have
to get there first.

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Klathmon
I love the table in the hardware section.

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ajross
A digression, but it's amusing how far afield they had to go to find a modern
SoC with a IMG GPU (vs. the rest of the world that is to first approximation
all Qualcomm, with a few Mali's running around from Samsung). Obviously the
_real_ IMG flagship is the Apple A9, but that's not co-branded appropriately.

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alexvoica
I wouldn't call Meizu, Xiaomi or other similar brands "far afield". They ship
tens of millions of devices (and soon maybe even hundreds) every year.

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ajross
But not on this particular SoC. Qualcomm (with Apple and Samsung not terribly
close behind) remains the volume king even in China, last I checked. This
other small-vendor SoC's are gaining momentum, but they're not there yet.

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alexvoica
The reality today is that MediaTek is number two in mobile after Qualcomm.
Meizu MX5 uses a MediaTek SoC as does the new Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 and many
others.

Trust me, it's my job to know.

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userbinator
MIPS is a good choice here because the relatively small transistor count means
it can be produced in a larger process, which gives better resistance to
radiation.

