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PowerPC in Space

It's nice to hear that PowerPC''s are seen as reliable enough for important missions like that one.
 
Wow, that made the rest of my day! Did you all know that the Xbox 360 has a PowerPC processor? So does the Wii. As for the Wii U, it has some branched-off evolution of PPC processor, but it still counts.
 
I wonder if it's because they started planning for this back in 2004. As I understand it NASA sticks with whatever computer tech is available when planning begins. Due to the amount of testing, debugging, reinforcing, &c which needs to be done. It would wreak havoc in planning if something changed.

Although faster G4 chips were available. Perhaps they weren't seen as reliable or were too power hungry.
 
velocityg4 said:
I wonder if it's because they started planning for this back in 2004. As I understand it NASA sticks with whatever computer tech is available when planning begins. Due to the amount of testing, debugging, reinforcing, &c which needs to be done. It would wreak havoc in planning if something changed.

Although faster G4 chips were available. Perhaps they weren't seen as reliable or were too power hungry.
Click to expand...

This exactly the explanation I got in regards to the Mars Rover.
Both for the hardware and software.
 
velocityg4 said:
I wonder if it's because they started planning for this back in 2004. As I understand it NASA sticks with whatever computer tech is available when planning begins. Due to the amount of testing, debugging, reinforcing, &c which needs to be done. It would wreak havoc in planning if something changed.

Although faster G4 chips were available. Perhaps they weren't seen as reliable or were too power hungry.
Click to expand...

They don't need super fast processors to run these things, and I guess they wanted something robust. It said they also enhanced the components so they would be more resilient to shock and such.
 
The Hubble Space Telescope when launched didn't have any onboard CPU. It was upgraded on one of the first few service missions to contain a radiation hardened Intell 486 so that is could process images taken. It's still up there, orbiting around and computing data at lovely 1990's pace.
 
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A lot of NASA's hardware is early 486 vintage, simply because it works and it processes what it needs to do. These systems don't have high overheads and are often very task specific so they don't need extra overheads for the nuances of pretty graphics or games of solitaire they just need to work.

There are some older missile silos and such littered across the American countryside that are running off even older technology like teletype terminals and such with the most expandability being a 5.25" magnetic disk.

They are task specific, mission critical machines, they're not a computer as you or I know it.
 
jbarley said:
The Mars Rover was based on a G3 CPU.
Link
Click to expand...
I know this is a very old topic I'm bumping, but it's about the same topic so why not :)
The Mars 2020 Rover is going to use mostly the same hardware as the Curiosity Rover, so it's yet again a RAD750 based computer. I really like that, despite PowerPC's death in consumer use after Nintendo finally dropped the architecture in favor of ARM with the Switch, the architecture of our old Macs lives on in space, the final frontier :)
 
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Daniël Oosterhuis said:
I know this is a very old topic I'm bumping, but it's about the same topic so why not :)
The Mars 2020 Rover is going to use mostly the same hardware as the Curiosity Rover, so it's yet again a RAD750 based computer. I really like that, despite PowerPC's death in consumer use after Nintendo finally dropped the architecture in favor of ARM with the Switch, the architecture of our old Macs lives on in space, the final frontier :)
Click to expand...

You certainly wouldn’t want to put an Intel CPU out beyond the stars. The Management Engine could pose a backdoor security risk... Alien hackers could possibly hijack earth’s entire Intel userbase to take control on a global supercomputer scale for their own Martian parallel computing purposes.
 
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AphoticD said:
You certainly wouldn’t want to put an Intel CPU out beyond the stars. The Management Engine could pose a backdoor security risk... Alien hackers could possibly hijack earth’s entire Intel userbase to take control on a global supercomputer scale for their own Martian parallel computing purposes.
Click to expand...
To be fair, the very first rover sent to Mars by NASA, the Sojourner, was an Intel, but it was based on the ancient 8085 chip, back in 1997. It lost communications after 85 days, but that's still impressive as the planned mission with it only consisted of 7 days, which means it outlasted its purpose. The Pathfinder lander that was launched with the rover did have an BAE Systems and IBM developed RAD6000 CPU, which is POWER1 based and similar to the PowerPC 601 chip. The following two Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity were given that BAE/IBM chip as well, and while Spirit sadly got stuck and NASA has given up on attempting to free it, Opportunity still bravely soldiers on, nearly fourteen years after landing. Other space probes and Mars landers have been equipped with the RAD6000 and RAD750 processors as well. It's no surprise NASA is still using what in our eyes is "obsolete", as these chips cost a LOT of money to develop, and they still do what they need to do. Just one single board computer with a RAD750 on it from BAE Systems will run you $200k.
 
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d-oost said:
The Mars 2020 Rover is going to use mostly the same hardware as the Curiosity Rover, so it's yet again a RAD750 based computer.
Click to expand...
And it just landed! Perseverance uses a 200MHz PowerPC G3. They also mentioned that this is the first time they're using Linux to power their rovers. We may have lost the battle for the consumer market, but we're still on top in space!
 
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You wouldn't be too far off in saying that(at least at one point) PowerPC ran the world. There's an entire line of embedded powerpc chips that are used in everything from routers, switches, and nics, to printers and fax machines. It's a pretty fascinating subject as most of the embedded ones are unheard of, but i bet at least one thing you have has an embedded ppc chip in it. The poewrpc 400 series especially saw tons and tons of use. For example the 405 was used in later ps2 slims as a replacement for the mips r3000a that handled IO, and it also was used in the IBM Power8 for on-chip power management. The 440 was used in the raid cards along with a few FPGA boards, and was used as the basis for a few supercomputers!

There's also the freescale qoriq(which is itself a really cool bunch of procs and still being made) series that are, off the top of my head, used in some microtik switches and routers. The QORIQ chips use cores derived from their earlier e series chips such as the e500, e5500, and e6500 depending on the series.
 
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r34per said:
You wouldn't be too far off in saying that(at least at one point) PowerPC ran the world. There's an entire line of embedded powerpc chips that are used in everything from routers, switches, and nics, to printers and fax machines. It's a pretty fascinating subject as most of the embedded ones are unheard of, but i bet at least one thing you have has an embedded ppc chip in it. The poewrpc 400 series especially saw tons and tons of use. For example the 405 was used in later ps2 slims as a replacement for the mips r3000a that handled IO, and it also was used in the IBM Power8 for on-chip power management. The 440 was used in the raid cards along with a few FPGA boards, and was used as the basis for a few supercomputers!

There's also the freescale qoriq(which is itself a really cool bunch of procs and still being made) series that are, off the top of my head, used in some microtik switches and routers. The QORIQ chips use cores derived from their earlier e series chips such as the e500, e5500, and e6500 depending on the series.
Click to expand...
I believe lots of ECUs/ECMs in vehicles used PPC chips as well.
 
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