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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

They didn't talk about radiation hardening. Is this chip safe to use in space? I thought a chip that dense would be vulnerable to cosmic rays?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

> Ingenuity, also called Ginny, is a small robotic helicopter operating on Mars.

> The helicopter uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor

Edit: There is a way to detect and recover from these types of errors. They appear to be able to run the computation on a number of cores with a voter to check for consistency.

Slide 41 (PDF warning): http://microelectronics.esa.int/riscv/rvws2022/presentations...

Ingenuity had a Snapdragon, but there was also a redundant pair of arm r5f microcontrollers (which are also lockstepped dual-core processors, so quadruple redundancy) where the flight controllers were, and a rad-tolerant FPGA (proasic) that watchdogged everything else. The Snapdragon was used for less critical code such as imaging and comms.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

Also, thanks to the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field Mars's surface is about 50 times more radioactive than the Earth's, but it's still no as bad as space out past the Van Allen belts

Lord Almighty, take a guess whether a space agency designing a chip for use in space might consider these things.

I'm asking for more information on how it's going to operate in a high radiation environment. I'm not assuming they haven't considered the problem.

joke : They do not have to care about error every 67 billionth callculation that much, AI is hallucinating enough.

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