
Originally Posted by
Tellos Athenaios
What you are overlooking here, is that your 486 contains a trivial amount of electronics compared to say your current laptop/desktop CPU. The difference is a couple of
order of magnitude. So no wonder that a modern desktop CPU is more fragile than the 486 in a high radiation environment: there's more components to "go wrong". But the modern equivalent to the 486 isn't a desktop CPU.
Instead it's something you might find in hospital machines or wafer bakers. Those have much tighter EMI requirements than the 486 ever had. So why don't we use that, then, you ask? Because software written for the 486 won't run on that kit.
EDIT: I guess the more interesting point is that 486 was made with knowledge of materials and their EMI properties of the late 1980's. We have much improved alloys and processing methods to deal with EMI now.
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