Worked for a well-known avionics company on various aircraft modernizing/upgrading programs only a year ago. We used Motorolla PPC604-class processors for the avionics on upgrading old C-130 cargo aircraft (200MHz, 32-each floating and integer general purpose registers, etc...). Of course, those processors are so old you can't buy them anymore. Our testing equipment instead used the PPC 74XX series processors. They had just upgraded from Ada-83 to Ada-95
The C-5 cargo aircraft AMP and RERP upgrades use a custom-built AMD ARM processor, also no longer available. This program still used Ada-83. We also used custom-built real-time OS's from companies like WindRiver(vxWorks) and GreenHills. You certainly don't run Windows or Linux on these machines.
In college we heard about how satellites use older processors because the size of the traces inside are large enough to withstand hits from various energetic particles. I.e. your new 45nm Intel would get fried in seconds being exposed to the radiation in space, while an old 386 with a 1um process can generaly withstand the bombardment
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Worked for a well-known avionics company on various aircraft modernizing/upgrading programs only a year ago. We used Motorolla PPC604-class processors for the avionics on upgrading old C-130 cargo aircraft (200MHz, 32-each floating and integer general purpose registers, etc...). Of course, those processors are so old you can't buy them anymore. Our testing equipment instead used the PPC 74XX series processors. They had just upgraded from Ada-83 to Ada-95
The C-5 cargo aircraft AMP and RERP upgrades use a custom-built AMD ARM processor, also no longer available. This program still used Ada-83. We also used custom-built real-time OS's from companies like WindRiver(vxWorks) and GreenHills. You certainly don't run Windows or Linux on these machines.
In college we heard about how satellites use older processors because the size of the traces inside are large enough to withstand hits from various energetic particles. I.e. your new 45nm Intel would get fried in seconds being exposed to the radiation in space, while an old 386 with a 1um process can generaly withstand the bombardment