Danny ChaiThat article on how the space shuttle is outdated mentioned how until recently it still used 8086 chips. I actually learned there’s a reason for this in one of my classes, where the professor worked at NASA Ames. I think he did some Mars stuff. Anyway, given the cost of each launch and the cost of the experiments and whatever, they need to minimize as much as possible the chance of failure. So they use old processors where the behavior is pretty much exactly known. You remember that big hullabaloo with the Intel chip that had a defect. Using something like that would have been a multi-billion dollar setback for NASA had they used it. Anyway, he said that’s why they use old processors, because they know almost exactly how it will perform, I’m assuming not just calculation wise but power wise and temperature wise too. Random context.