Controller specifications
SXD version 6
The original SXD main controller unit, first introduced in 1988, was a 32-bit system powered by the then-new Motorola 68020 CPU clocked at 16 MHz. The firmware, SXD System 6, was housed in a 4 MB ROM. The system had relatively little onboard RAM (512 KB), which was sufficient for its relatively narrow range of responsibilities:
Data could be loaded from an internal tape drive (based on the Exabyte 8505, sold as an upgrade) or an external magneto-optical diskette cartridge located inside the battery compartment. EXB-8505 tape drives can hold up to 60 TB of high-density slow storage, and typical MOD cartridges of the era had a capacity of 652 MB.
Features like software updating, user recognition, voice modulation, and kinematic control were not present in this early system. In terms of capabilities, the SXD 6 was comparable to home computers of the era that ran on the same CPU, such as the Macintosh II, Amiga 2500, and Sol-3. The SXD 6 was very restricted in terms of what custom software it could run, however; the standard ROM provided no facilities for executing programs from external storage.
Later revisions to the SXD 6 consisted of replacement ROM chips, with no significant changes to the hardware. These added features like user management and script execution, and pushed the version number as high as 7.2. Due to a defect in the charging interface, fewer than a dozen SXD 6 controllers survived the 1990s; the most significant being the controller of SXD 999-54-5620, which was a demonstration unit that had been modified as part of a failed early wireless charging experiment, inadvertently fixing the defect that killed so many others. All modern NS controllers are based on 999-54-5620's schematics.
DAX/2 version 7
Designed in early 2015, the first DAX/2 was built using off-the-shelf modern components roughly in line with the specifications of the SXD 6. This was a true 32-bit system using the PowerPC 970 CPU clocked at 1.6 GHz, with 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, which was mostly underutilized by the OS, SXD System 7. The system was similar in capabilities to the Power Mac G5, which had been introduced by Apple over a decade earlier. System 7 supported three-tier user management, remote command access, and a basic on-screen display. It still had no software update or installation facilities and could not execute programs from outside of RAM. Satellite uplink functionality, having long been discontinued, was instead replaced with several transceiver arrays.
Version 8 controllers
From 2015–2022, most civilian Nanite Systems controllers had the same general hardware specifications:
These systems are the only consumer products based on modern POWER ISA chips. Most other modern POWER CPUs are used in enterprise servers, HPC, and development platforms for HPC applications.
The software for version 8 controllers was initially known as SXD System Firmware 8, but starting with version 8.3.3, became known as Companion instead. Companion used a 512 KB boot ROM called Foundation to load the full OS from flash memory. For most of its history, Companion (and SXD System before it) was cooperatively multi-tasked with a fixed memory map. Companion 8.5 introduced the Whip microkernel and true preemptive multitasking, which lasted until the platform's retirement.
Military-grade controllers use ECC RAM, as well as CPUs from the RAD5500 family, which provide radiation hardening at the cost of an older version of the instruction set and a much slower clock speed of around 400 MHz. The Aegis, Mesta, Jovian, SuperAide, and Breakwater use triple-modular redundancy and therefore have 6 CPUs in total.
Devices based on the oXq.205 series, including the Revenant, primarily operate via a single silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufactured with an unknown 0.19 nm process, using 144 layers. Its exact specifications are unknown, but based on slight variations in die shots it is most likely a family of readily-available components that were deployed as needed. It is debated as to whether the oXq SoC is running some sort of POWER emulator or is actually an FPGA. Some oXq.205.0a cores were found to contain extra circuitry believed to be used for interfacing with photodiodes and nanolasers; and it is theorized that the original manufacturer primarily dealt in optronic computing.
Although Foundation is not UEFI or BIOS compatible, other OSes have been successfully run on Companion hardware using chain-loading, including several BSDs (Flatirons, AmberBSD, and MistBSD) and Opaque NIX. These are of limited utility due to their weak driver support, although the MistBSD Project, which routinely refuses to be intimidated by exotic hardware, has maintained a community port called MistBSD/nsppc since 2016, based on the MistBSD/ebmnws port.
Version 9 controllers
August 2023 saw the release of the CX-SCADA Supervisor controller and the first developer previews of the new ARES operating system, formerly known as ATOS/CX. Along with the SXD/A9 courtesan unit and PsyDS development system, the Supervisor paved the way for a new generation of main controllers based on the POWER9 architecture. These have a slower clock speed (typically 4 GHz) but up to 24 cores, which are each assigned individual system daemons for improved performance. The version 9 controllers are also the first generation to include dedicated GPU hardware for HUD display, based on the INVIDIOUS GraVity RTX 4090, and include as standard 256 GB of DDR4 RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage, which are used to supplement the working memory of the unit's primary CortexPlus compute hardware.
As of May 2024, no alternative operating system has yet been ported to a version 9 NS controller, although there are many candidates, including Deviant Linux, Zoboomafoo, Opaque NIX, and EBM e, all of which have POWER9 support. Since ARES has many POSIX-like features that were absent from Companion, the value of establishing a new NS port is somewhat diminished.