Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is standard in a huge range of off-the-shelf consumer products, such as automotive electronics. They also are expected to operate under a huge temperature range, high humidity, etc...

Military hardware isn't magic unobtanium that exists in some parallel plane with unique physical conditions.

The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering.

PS: It turns out I had misread the L3Harris info page. That spec isn't for the existing F-35 computers that are now about 20 years old, but for the TR-3 upgrade which will start rolling out in mid-2024!!! These new "flying supercomputers" will be 16x faster than before. This is equivalent to upgrading from a 1994 Intel Pentium to an Apple Watch Series 1 from 2015.

L3Harris is delivering just 1,000 units of these multi-kilowatt monstrosities for a low-low price of $300 million.

> The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering.

Say who? what were the competing solutions and how did F-35 go with the selection?

The competing solutions were offered only by other bloated MIC corporations with similar habits of feeding from the government pork barrel.

I've been on both sides of this tendering process, and it's absurd how horrifically inefficient it makes things. Small, agile, and capable vendors are literally excluded from the process and can't even begin to meet the criteria for acceptance. But... that's the point. It's not about cost-efficiency or product quality, but about keeping a few well-connected companies happy.

Try to look at things from the perspective of someone like Elon Musk, or a leader you admire from any FAANG or successful modern company.

Now tell them with a straight face that you're going to keep using computer hardware from the 1990s for 20+ years without an upgrade because... the paperwork is too hard.

You'd be laughed at, and then booted from the organisation for gross incompetence.

In the military, that's normal way things are done.

Imagine running Facebook, Google, or Amazon on 20 year old hardware. Picture that for a second.

Or if you want space-rated flight hardware, imagine SpaceX using something from the 1990s for Falcon 9 rockets because of red-tape.

You're rationalising nonsense. You're trying to tell me that it's good and proper that America and its allies are going to war with planes that have flight hardware that is equivalent to what I wear on my wrist to tell me the time, but uses 100,000x the power, takes up 500x the volume, and costs 1,000x as much.

The needs of these systems are radically different.

We don't need ever more speed in processing, this isn't games.

Things like ultra reliable down to the nanosecond timing, etc. are important for these applications, not raw computing power.

You fundamentally don't understand some things about the application, therefore are presenting solutions that seem smart on the surface but are actually fundamentally flawed and non starters.

> The needs of these systems are radically different.

Different to what? Desktop PCs? Commercial avionics? Space-rated computers? Military fighter jet avionics from other planes?

The future upgrade to the F-35 is orders of magnitude worse at every metric than everything else in any of those categories.

For example, the latest F/18 has a computer that is several hundred times faster. It’s also a “networked” fighter jet with sensor integration, etc…

So what’s different about the F-35 avionics that justifies $300K per unit for the computer power of an outdated Apple Watch!?

From where I’m sitting it’s purely corruption and incompetence.

You’re saying it’s something else. Okay, what is it?

They just started delivering those block III super hornets in 2021. You are comparing hardware from different generations. Just because it's an older plane doesn't mean the avionics in it haven't been upgraded since. Don't worry, they'll get to upgrading the f35s and then they will have the newer hardware. It's the natural progression of these things.

I'm comparing the 2021 F/18 computers to the upcoming TR-3 upgrade of the F-35s which won't actually start until mid-2024!

They're upgrading the 1994 level of computer power to 2015 level of computer power... in 2024, when they already have directly comparable fighter jet avionics that has a "giga" where this thing has a "mega".

The F35 is a massive network of independent computer systems, you seem to be using “computer power” rather abstractly. Some of the computing components are state-of-the-art and others are rather old, based on requirements. Who cares if a computing component is slow if it doesn’t need to be faster than it already is. Other parts of the F35 exceed the capabilities of anything you can buy off-the-shelf.

The need to upgrade many of these computing systems is bottlenecked by the ability to upgrade the sensor systems that would necessitate upgrading the computing systems.

Also, you are talking about “mega” and “giga” when many modern US systems are “peta”. With all due respect, you might be working from an obsolete understanding of these systems.

Let me guess… do you work at Boeing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com