NASA’s New RISC-V Space Chip Offers 100x Performance Boost for Future Mars Missions
NASA and Microchip Technology Inc. are testing a palm-sized, radiation-resistant processor that could make mission systems 100x more powerful than current spaceflight computers, like the ageing RAD750 PowerPC-based single board computer.
JPL reports that the High‑Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) SoC, developed in partnership with Microchip, has passed early functional testing and is showing performance far beyond today's flight‑qualified processors. The HPSC family includes both a radiation‑hardened version for deep‑space and long‑duration missions and a radiation‑tolerant variant aimed at commercial low‑Earth‑orbit satellites, giving mission designers a scalable tool for everything from small science probes to crewed lunar systems.
The HPSC SoC uses modern open architecture and multi‑core designs to bring vector processing and deep‑learning accelerators into spaceflight hardware. Some reports claim that the SoC is comprised of 12 RISC‑V primary coresand eight SiFive Intelligence X280 cores, plus another four unspecified RISC-V cores. The chip integrates cores, hardware accelerators, memory, and...
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