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B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the decade-late dept.

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

6 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. There's a Reason for That by hardburn · · Score: 5, Informative

    While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.

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    1. Re:There's a Reason for That by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.

    2. Re:There's a Reason for That by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      "pentium class", not pentium. It's actually an ARM processor (better tolerance to heat, radiation, environmental extremes, etc).

    3. Re:There's a Reason for That by halivar · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."

  2. Not surprised, even if I am amused by Duncan+Blackthorne · · Score: 5, Informative

    Having worked for a defense contractor (non-weapons, mind you) for 6 years, it doesn't surprise me at all that the technology for such things are at least 10 years behind state of the art. It takes so long to fully satisfy the requirements of a military contract, then it takes at least as long to fix all the little bugs that inevitably pop up after delivery; then there's the military amending their requirements halfway through the project, sometimes resulting in having to go almost all the way back to square one in the design cycle. Oh, and don't even get me started on requirements that belong in cartoons and comic books, not the real world of engineering.

  3. Re:Don't you mean? by everett · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

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