Wednesday 19th June 2013 20:24 GMT
bscottm
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Re: It just costs money
It's not the GHz clock cycle that is the problem. It's the smaller feature size of the transistors that increases the single event upset (SEU) rate. Yes, the two are inter-related, but one could conceivably build multi-core, chip symmetric multiprocessors based on the PDP-11 at today's feature sizes and not have GHz clock cycle times (and still end up with significant SEU rates.)

A couple of years ago, a NASA/JPL scientist pointed out that the alpha particles (helium nuclei) from lead solder were causing interesting issues with current x86_64 I/O pins -- radiation issues on commodity hardware.