Please note that airbus flybywire software does not require supercomputers : an Intel 8186 does the job pretty well. 20 years old technology ... much cheaper and much more powerfull hardware is available today - about 1000 times more powerfull ....
Yes, more powerful hardware is available now - but do you know *why* the decision was made to use older hardware, and indeed why previous generation hardware continues to be used in safety-critical situations?
In the home and business sectors of computing, the onus is on bang for buck - no-one particularly cares if a fast processor crashes once in a while if the worst that can happen is losing a report that's due in tomorrow. In safety-critical systems the focus is on predictability - knowing that barring a catastrophic hardware failure a certain input will *always* produce a given output.
In the case of the Airbus system, the 80186 was a 1982 update of technology that was released in 1977, and had been developed for several years prior to that. Which means that it was in effect 6 years old by the time the A320 was delivered (26 years old now), based on technology that was 5 years older than that (31 years old now). Then as now, 6 years is a long time in microprocessor development.
Processors of that vintage were very simple technology by today's standards - but that's what makes them useful in real-time, safety-critical systems. As a Software Engineering graduate you'll remember your first Hardware Architecture lesson and the diagram you were shown, illustrating the program counter, registers and arithmetic/logic unit. '70s and early '80s era processors were slightly more complex but still hewed to that basic design. Today's modern processors are nothing like that - they are essentially a CISC translation unit which takes the x86 instructions and translates them into a format that a highly-complex RISC back-end then uses to do the grunt work. Such a design is wonderful for today's desktops, workstations and servers but their complexity makes it a challenge to answer the safety-critical question of predictability with any conviction.
Hence the A330/340 was introduced 4 years after the A320, but still used the 80186 in the SEC. The Space Shuttle continues to use heat and radiation-hardened variants of the Motorola 68000, a design of similar vintage to the original 8086 (but logically structured more in line with the PDP-11 computers used in development in the 1970s). The latest Honeywell FMS uses an AMD design that's 20 years old now.
Anyways, that's how I understand it - I'm sure the Prof will correct me if I've made any glaring mistakes, seeing as my knowledge was only current when I graduated Uni 7 years ago.
Apologies to the mods if this post is too far off-topic.