NASA will manufacture its own processors to go to the Moon and Mars

A curious phenomenon is taking place and that is that more and more companies and different organizations are committed to manufacturing their own processors. Now, NASA , the well-known US space agency, announces that it will collaborate with the SiFive company to develop its own processors based on the RISC-V architecture for its future missions to the Moon and Mars.

The RISC-V architecture for processors, for those who don’t know, is an open source chip design. This design appears to be quite flexible and customizable much better than ARM processor designs and solutions developed by Intel and AMD.

NASA will manufacture its own processors to go to the Moon and Mars

We will go to Mars with an open architecture processor

An interesting bid is from NASA , which has chosen SiFive to develop a core CPU for high-performance spaceflight computing (HPSC). This solution will be used in all future lunar and Mars surface exploration missions.

The announcement indicates that the processor will use a SiFive Intelligence X280 computing subsystem that has 8 cores of RISC-V architecture . Additionally, another four SiFive RISC-V cores will be added, possibly for backup and data verification tasks, among others. It is indicated that these new processors will have up to 100 times more computational capacity than currently used processors.

Note that the HPSC processor and X280 compute subsystem are expected to be used in other government agencies. This is due to its great versatility, which makes it ideal for other aerospace applications, industrial automation, etc.

Thanks to this increase in computing power, new possibilities open up. New mission elements will be developed, such as autonomous vehicles, vision processing, new space flight systems, guidance systems, communications and many other applications.

Another interesting aspect of this election is that not only will the processors be designed by an American company, they will also be manufactured in the United States. Additionally, the RISC-V architecture began to be developed in 2010 at the University of California.

RISC-V_3

An advanced processor to explore planets

The SiFive X280 may not ring a bell, and that’s normal since it’s not a commercial solution like those from Intel or AMD. It is based on the RISC-V architecture and features a multicore design that features vector extensions. Additionally, this processor has support for artificial intelligence.

Such a processor is developed for high-performance single-threaded applications when there are significant power constraints. This means that the processor has a really low consumption and makes it ideal for space exploration. We are talking about an environment where obtaining energy is very limited and each watt of energy counts a lot.

SiFive indicates that the X280 shows an increase of up to 100 times the computing capabilities compared to other similar systems today. Also, according to the company, in science and space loads, it shows to be much better than competing CPUs.

It also has a large academic and scientific community that develops software specifically for these open source processors. This allows for the development of specific software and algorithms that greatly optimize performance.