And it looks like it's not a clear winner over those, either.

It's sort of funny how many of the flaws of old computing hardware turned out to be hugely beneficial for use in space. Bulky transistors that are relatively safe from bit flipping, high power draw that means small fluctuations don't cause outages, limited processing and storage that forced efficiency and lowered the amount of stuff exposed to radiation.

I'm not sure where the tipping points would be, but it wouldn't surprise me if getting a 386 working in space is easier than getting a Pentium 4 to achieve the same things.

Cool. The control machine seems like a bit of a waste though. Hardware degrades randomly even on Earth, it'll be hard to make any meaningful comparison with a single sample.