Originally Posted by
MarcK
The 286 was introduced 2/1982, and notified as end-of-life (last ship) 3/1999.
Possibly as a commercial PC chip but there are manufacturers making 80286 boards as aviation uses a lot of them. The reason is that in the late 1980's the safety people in aviation were really taken with the idea of 'formal proof' of all the processing in avionics. I can remember briefings back then on how this would remove errors - totally disregarding the fact that hardware manufacturing errors and even software coding errors were even then getting rarer and could be handled. The worst kind of error was as in MCAS a perfectly implemented poor design. Nevertheless, it became a requirement that the hardware had to be formally proved. Then along came multi-core chips with intelligent prefetch and with preemption and multiprocessing... and the 'formal proof' rapidly became an extremely hard Np problem. So 80286's continue to be used as they can be formally proved. And this in itself is a problem as they are 'beasts of very little brain' especially when trying to handle a multiplicity of interrupts.
Is Ancient Silicon The Root Of Boeing’s Problems?
It is about time that the entire area is revisited as the handheld game player the 4 year old has in seat 28G is many times more powerful than the FCCs. All smart phones are way way above the capabilities of the CPU in the FCC. Like communications the time has come to abandon some of these old 'safety' ideas and move to a more commercial approach as is used in other areas. Size, Weight and Power are not an issue these days.