Generally speaking, when it comes to stealth fighters, there are usually four main standards that must be met, namely, stealth, supersonic cruise, super maneuver and super information integration. The first three features are the most common to us, but the fourth feature cannot be found in conventional displays. This also makes the stealth fighter's highly integrated computer network, that is, the onboard computer, is covered with a veil of mystery. People’s subconsciousness will exaggerate things with a sense of mystery. For example, the performance indicators of military equipment must be higher than civilian products, and this set of logic is naturally applied to computers of the fifth generation of aircraft, thinking that the performance of airborne computers is the best in the world. Advanced system. In fact, this idea is completely opposite. The performance of the onboard computer of the fifth-generation fighter is not as good as expected.
To verify this, we must compare it with the fifth-generation stealth fighter. The US F22 Raptor is the world’s first fifth-generation stealth fighter and is recognized as the best overall performance. The F22 fighter jet was finalized in 2001, and the earliest development history of the PPC chip used in its airborne computer can be extended to 1991. Until 2005, Apple computers in the United States used this chip, but it was later replaced by an Intel series chip, but the F22 fighter chip has not changed so far. This kind of CPU is now more than a dozen CPUs in the civilian market. Times. Looking back at the onboard central computer of the F22 fighter jet, the F22 has two onboard central computers, one for flight control and one for fire control. The amount of comprehensive calculation required is even less than that of today’s large-scale 3D games. There is a single on F22. The computer can process 10.5 billion instructions per second and has a memory of 300m. Judging from the current 6-12g running memory of mobile phones, the performance of F22's central computer processor is not even worse than that of current smart phones.
Of course, this phenomenon occurs because the replacement of mobile phones is much faster than the development cycle of fighter aircraft. Different from other systems of fighters, if you want to understand the performance of the onboard computer of a fighter, you only need to look at the year of the finalization of the fighter, and then start from this year and push forward four or five. Looking at the performance of the best-performing computer chip at that time, you can roughly figure it out. Many people question whether the fighter computer system will not be upgraded? The F22 only formed combat effectiveness in 2005, and the "incremental" upgrade plan started in 2010. The incremental plan is mainly software upgrades with few hardware replacements. The radar SAR mode and the launch capabilities of SDB, AIM9X and AIM120D are mainly increased. Does not include computers and processors.
In comparison, the update speed of civilian computer chips is much faster. It often takes 30 years for military aircraft to overhaul and upgrade, while civilian computer chips will be updated in 1-2 years. In other words, the chips installed on military aircraft are often more than ten or twenty years ago, and their performance is naturally inferior to civilian aircraft. However, military computers and chips are also incomparable to civilian products, that is, they have higher requirements for the environment. This is the true military standard. For example, it is resistant to high and low temperatures. After all, the high-altitude temperature above 10,000 meters will drop to minus thirty or forty degrees. At this time, military chips can still work normally, and your mobile phone will automatically shut down when it is more than ten degrees below zero in winter.
Among the current five generations of machines, the most powerful computing power is the latest F35 of the US military. It is equipped with four PowerPC G4 processors jointly developed by Apple, Motorola, and IBM. The floating-point calculation capability is 1 billion operations/ second. In the future, my country’s J-20 is expected to be replaced with the "Soul Core II A" chip released by China Electronics Technology 38 in 2018. This chip has a floating-point operation capability of 100 billion operations per second, and its single-core performance exceeds the current international market. The performance of similar chips is 4 times, further confirming that my country's computers have reached the world's advanced standards.
