But what they’re not telling you is how much the big truck in the parking bay running the liquid helium coolant system is going to cost you…
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Ah, I didn’t think of industrial/avionics/automotive etc. use. That’s some really nice field computer, probably very expensive as well and of a different league compared to a Toughbook. Probably also the need of many native slots to accomodate internal acquisition cards makes the biggest difference. I would imagine USB still can’t guarantee the strict latency required in those fields.
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The dual-socket version looks ready to gnaw your ears off(below); but it shouldn’t be too bad. Both threadripper and epyic TDPs are under 300w/socket; and those giant multi-chip packages give you a fair amount of contact area to work with. PCIe cards are also not joking around(something like the V100 PCIe option is also 250w in a double-width PCIe slot); but that’s a lower power density than some fairly prosaic 1U pizzaboxes; which are lower density than the specialized liquid-cooled-only stuff.
Would prefer not too work too closely with one for too long; but hardly the most absurd exercise in air cooling.
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So this being 2020 and Trump and the pandemic was only a nightmare and it’s actually 1984?! Thank god!!
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I used to teach Lotus and suchlike remotely with a dozen of those.
They weren’t nearly as much fun as you thought they would be. And were an absolute bitch to set up as a network.
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Some modern aircraft still have avionics that use 486 processors. You could fly across the atlantic powered by a 486 and never be the wiser!
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Travelling Forth across the C, eh?
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Neat.
Although… does that mean 30-year-old chips (less neat, more scary), or brand-new chips built to 30-year-old specs (more neat, less scary)?
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Old chips.
Some systems have had updates over the years. Many have not.
Also, the avionics are usually stand-alone modules that pass data on to other processors in the aircraft suite.
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The Z80 is still in production to this day - you can even order them from Digikey. On the other hand, things get trickier with radiation-hardened chips, and older technology can linger on for anything operating in space.
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Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks
Boeing 747-400s still use floppy disks for loading critical navigation databases, Pen Test Partners has revealed to the infosec community after poking about one of the recently abandoned aircraft.
Article has a video-walkthrough of a 747-400 with lots about the avionics.
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Back in the mid-late 80’s I used to lug around a Compaq ‘portable’ that weighed about 30lbs, it had a full sized keyboard, 5 slots for add-in board like IEEE488, hires VGA display card (680 x 480) as the on-board display was a 7 inch green (mono) display. Considering it got thrown in the back of the car and went in and out of sales calls it was pretty reliable, never failed and was abandoned 2 to 3 years later when everything was significantly shrunk down.
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The very first computer that I bought with my own money was an IBM “Portable PC” that was similar in concept. They were being sold off to students at fire-sale prices, probably due to their lack of marketplace popularity. It was literally a PC/XT motherboard in a portable case with a monitor and (as bought) two floppy drives.
By the time it died, it had a 286 on a card, an external VGA monitor, and a 65 MB hard drive. If the power supply wasn’t a bizarre non-standard design, I might have never thrown it out.
Luxury!
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Funny how such small screens weren’t a big issue when I was younger.
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