One for old-school Mac hardware fans (& space enthusiasts)

PowerPC, boldly going where no Intel has gone before...

NASA’s Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover Curiosity Essentially Has The Same Brain As A Bondi Blue iMac G3

As one insightful redditor notes: “Curiosity is essentially a 2-CPU Power Macintosh G3 with some nifty peripherals and one **** of a UPS.”

Click to expand...

(The PowerPC RAD750 processor is just a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750 - better known as the PowerPC G3 - under-clocked to 200MHz)

Awesome.

That's actually pretty cool to know. Just goes to show that you don't need a whole lot of power to do such great things.

With many of these government/NASA space projects...they say that the design/budgeting/building many times starts somewhere in the neighborhood of 10+ years BEFORE the vehicle is actually launched.

I'm guessing that when this project was started...the designers were probably working with what the current technology was 10-12+ years ago...plus they are not going to buy the most up-to-date technology at that time (expensive)...so they probably worked with even slightly older technology to save some money.

I think that systems that are in orbit (like the Hubble space telescope)...because they are accessible...are upgradeable. And I know that the Hubble telescope has had various upgrades/repairs over the years.

Unfortunately...something sitting on the surface of Mars is hard to upgrade!

- Nick

Yes it is a G3 processor that's is running Curiosity.

So I guess it wont be able to run Mountain Lion

Seriously though, its a radiation hardened version of the G3, often used for space projects like probes and satellites. I guess, being a simpler chip, with older 90 nm technology and a very low power consumption, there is less to go wrong in the harsh environment in space and on Mars. They could have used a i7 chip, but its probably a whole lot more susceptible to radiation damage.

If they need a few spare processors for the next mission I've got a couple of clamshell iBooks taking up space. I might even have the processor upgrade I put in my B&W G3 before it died.