When NASA’s perseverance guide on the surface of Mars on February 18th, it did it with the same processor that powered the iMac G3 since 1998. You know, the colorful and bulbous birou all-in-one which saved Apple’s business and helped it grow into the company it is today. Conformable New scientist (via Gizmodo), From NASA the last rover shows a branch of the PowerPC 750 processor. This processor is about 23 years old in 2021.
By modern standards, the PowerPC 750 is nothing fancy. It is a single-core processor with approximately 6 million transistors and a clock speed of 233 MHz. Compare it to Apple’s recent announcement Chipset M1, which has 16 billion transistors and a maximum clock speed of 3.2 GHz and you are talking about a very modest processor in the PowerPC 750. But the speed (or lack thereof) is not the reason why NASA accepted it.
You see, NASA has a thing for proven technology. For example, in 2006 the agency equipped the New Horizons probe with a Mongoose-V processor, a radiation-enhanced version of the original PlayStation MIPS R3000 processor.
And when you send a $ 2.4 billion rover in one direction to a planet 38.6 million kilometers closest to Earth, you need a reliable processor first. And that’s exactly what PowerPC 750 has shown itself countless times. The RAD750 variant of the PowerPC 750 inside Perseverance has been reinforced to withstand 200,000 to 1,000,000 rad and temperatures between -55 and 125 degrees Celsius (-67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit). The RAD750 is currently in about 100 satellites orbiting the Earth. Everyone is still working.
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