Not long ago, NASA’s Perseverance successfully landed on the surface of Mars and continued to search for evidence of “life” on Mars for humans.
In a declassified article on the Perseverance Mars Rover published in the media, it mentioned its nuclear-powered energy supply and aerial crane landing technology. Among them, there is another point that has attracted attention, that is, the core processor of the Perseverance Mars Rover is actually IBM PowerPC 750. The PowerPC 750 has a frequency of only 233MHz and built-in 6 million transistors. It was used in the 1998 iMac.
If you are an astronomy enthusiast, I am afraid that the Curiosity rover on Mars 9 years ago also used this processor.
Obviously, for the Perseverance Mars rover with a cost of US$2.7 billion (approximately NT$75.1 billion), choosing a processor is definitely not a cost consideration, so why not an advanced processor like i9-10900K?
The reason is that the atmospheric concentration of Mars is only one percent of that of the earth, and the protection of radiation and charged particles is far inferior to that of the earth. Therefore, the more complex the processor, the higher the probability of errors in its electronic components. In fact, the PowerPC 750 used by the Perseverance Mars rover and Curiosity is not exactly the same as the iMac back then, but a variant of the RAD750 chip, which has strengthened the prevention of cosmic radiation, and the cost is as high as 200,000 US dollars (approximately NT$556). Ten thousand yuan).
Other hardware parameters of Perseverance Mars Rover include 256MB memory, 2GB flash memory, Linux system, etc.
Source of news/pictures:Fast Technology
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