NASA has announced that it has major upgrade plans for the processors it will use in next-generation spacecraft and devices. The new generation high-performance space computing processors, called HPSC, will be produced by Microchip. NASA is preparing to spend $50 million for this update. The new systems will be built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) facilities in Southern California.
In addition to being very fast, NASA says the overall fault tolerance and reliability of the system will increase, compared to the latest generation technology, which is now 30 years old. Newer processors are more efficient because they can disable certain rendering functions when not in use.
NASA has announced that Microchip’s processor architecture will visibly increase computational efficiency on NASA missions. Computers in spacecraft will perform calculations 100 times faster than previous generation processors, thanks to the new processors.
NASA isn’t the only spaceflight organization looking to upgrade aging computing equipment. Recently, the European Space Agency (ESA) also announced that it would upgrade its legacy Windows 98-based software.
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