While watching NASA put a rover on Mars last month it definitely looked like the agency had to use it a kind of highprocessor technology in your machine. Surely the rover is built on something much more powerful than the components of the devices we civilians use, right? But wat NASA technically uses a specialized processor for powers the Perseverance rover, not far from the world of consumer electronics—About 23 years ago.
NewScientist reports that the The Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750 processor, which was used in Apple’s original 1998 iMac G3, reminiscent of the iconic, colorful transparent desktop.. If the PowerPC name sounds familiar, it’s probably because they are the RISC CPUs that Apple used on their computers before switching to Intel. (Although now the company is back to the RISC train with its own production M1 processor.)
The PowerPC 750 was a233 MHz processor, and compared to the 5.0 GHz-plus multi-core frequencies that modern consumer chips can achieve, the 233 MHz is incredibly slow. But the 750 was the first to incorporate dynamic branch prediction, which is still used in modern processors. Basically, the CPU architecture makes a conjecture formed about what instructions the CPU will process as a way to improve efficiency. The more information is processed, the better you will get the chip to preachindicating what to do next.
However, there is an important difference between the iMac’s CPU and the one inside the Perseverance rover. BAE Systems manufactures the radiation hardened version of the PowerPC 750, dubbed RAD750, which can withstand between 200,000 and 1,000,000 radii and temperatures between -55 and 125 degrees Celsius (-67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit). Mars does not have the same type of atmosphere as Earth it protects us from the sun’s rays, so a sunburst is over for the Mars rover before its adventure begins. Ea cost more than $ 200,000, so extra protection is needed.
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“A charged particle running across the galaxy can pass through a device and wreak havoc,” James LaRosa of BAE Systems told NewScientist. “It can literally release electrons; may cause electronic noise and signal spikes within the circuit “.
But why use a processor big enough to remember when Eve 6 released their first album? It has nothing to do with cost …these older processors are best for work because they are reliable. NASAThe Orion probe, for example, used the same RAD750 processor.
“Compared to the [Intel] Core i5 on your laptop, it’s much slower … andIt’s probably no faster than your smartphone, “said Matt Lemke, deputy director of NASA’s Orion avionics. he said The Space Review back in 2014. “But it’s not so much about speed as it is about robustness and reliability. I have to make sure it always works. “
Given this, it is reasonable that NASA he would choose old technology over new things. After all, when you spend $ 2.7 billion to land a robot on Mars, it is important that your technology is reliable enough to stand the test of time.to the smallest soldier circuits. Currently, the RAD750 powers around 100 satellites orbiting the Earth, which includes GPS, imaging and weather data, as well as several military satellites. None of them have failed, according to LaRosa.