Space flight computers in the public sector are generally 15-20 years behind the types of hardware we commonly work with on the ground, as I think this page shows.
We now have pretty capable low-power SoCs and FPGAs that we've yet to see broadly leveraged for govt. space applications. SpaceX flies Starlink with Xilinx FPGAs, while NASA and DoD are still baselining new platforms on incredibly expensive (albeit rad-hard) PowerPC RAD750 and similar. This is a huge bottleneck for any computationally intensive task we might want to do on-orbit, and I'm curious if or when it will change. It's one technical reason, in my opinion, that the private sector is currently calling the shots in space.
We now have pretty capable low-power SoCs and FPGAs that we've yet to see broadly leveraged for govt. space applications. SpaceX flies Starlink with Xilinx FPGAs, while NASA and DoD are still baselining new platforms on incredibly expensive (albeit rad-hard) PowerPC RAD750 and similar. This is a huge bottleneck for any computationally intensive task we might want to do on-orbit, and I'm curious if or when it will change. It's one technical reason, in my opinion, that the private sector is currently calling the shots in space.