CAES, a leader in advanced mission-critical electronics for aerospace and defense, has announced that its GR740 quad-core LEON4FT SPARC V8 Microprocessor has been launched onboard the Rashid Rover on December 11 and is now heading to the moon. The Rashid Rover was developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center and is traveling to the moon onboard the Mission 1 lunar lander as part of the HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program. The mission of the four-wheel rover, weighing only 10 kilograms or 22 pounds, will last one lunar day, or 14 Earth days. Its objective is to study the properties of lunar soil, the petrography and geology of the moon, dust movement, and the lunar surface plasma condition and photoelectron sheath.

The GR740 Microprocessor is embedded in the Camera Interface Board (CIB) that is used to control the four cameras onboard the Rashid Rover through an embedded SpaceWire router switch. The GR740 board has been developed by CAES together with AAC Clyde Space. The CIB is connected to a Sirius TCM board, also developed by AAC Clyde Space, which stores and manages the captured and processed images before downloading them to ground.

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 143 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

Oracle, which inherited the SPARC CPU machine architecture from its big Sun Microsystems acquisition from way back in 2010, made its biggest SPARC-related announcement ever since. The company is developing a new multi-core SPARC processor, codenamed "M7." This chip, according to Oracle, will not only be in the same league as today's contemporary enterprise CPU architectures, but will also feature Oracle's on-chip optimizations, such as special on-chip firmware, that improves performance and security of applications.

A large, on-chip micro-code would work to ensure security of in-memory databases (the chip would feature an integrated memory controller), and hardware-accelerated compression/decompression of very large databases for near real-time analytics. The M7 is the first SPARC-based processor designed from the ground-up by Oracle, and it will go on sale later this week, as part of the company's new T-series and M-series servers. It will also be offered in upgrade kits for Oracle Supercluster, a high-density machine designed specifically for Oracle.