This lays it out more explicitly:

https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/microchip-to-develop-next-ge...

"NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has selected Microchip to develop the High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor that will provide at least 100 times the computational capacity of current spaceflight computers for all types of future space missions, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions.

The radiation hardened, fault tolerant processor will be based on 12 instantiations of the X280 RISC-V core from SiFive and will be used in a series of ruggedised radiation tolerant single board computers."

Microsemi (acquired by Microchip) has built RISC-V hardware in the past:

https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/iot/article/21...

And now I want a 12 core radiation hardened SBC. Hopefully Microchip can sell these commercially. It'd be fun to see folks do steam punk themed rad hardened "cyberdeck" using one: https://hackaday.com/2022/09/04/2022-cyberdeck-contest-the-b...

I wonder if a rad-hardened SBC would be covered by ITAR like a lot of other space stuff? If so, would probably push the price and amount of paperwork out of reach of private individuals?

Thank you, that was the missing piece.

Microchip is no stranger to RISC-V[0].

0. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/about/news-releases/products...