NASA’s latest Mars rover has the same processor as an iMac from 1998

pendragon1 said:
yes but they could have come up with something newer/better by now... 233mhz 256 ram and 2gb storage seems like so little for what its doing up there.
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Hey, that can do a lot more than you'd think, especially when it's not rendering a GUI. As for the process node, bear in mind there's untold numbers of ARM chips even faster than that out there, running on 90nm processes. I've got an STM32H743 sitting on my desk that runs at 480MHz and has 1MB of RAM on it. It costs like $10.

But the other reason is that that PPC is probably radiation-hardened, which takes quite a bit of $$$ to develop, test, and validate.
 
SvenBent said:
You lack of understanding does not make you an expertise.
I really don't get why people are so quick to jump directly from "I don't understand why they did this" to "I am smarter than them"
You are literally using your lack of knowledge to say you know more...
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Yeah man, you don't understand. The joke, you missed it. I'll admit, it was a bad one.

I understood why they did it. I read the article before I commented. If anyone is jumping directly into something, its you.
 
serpretetsky said:
When one thing is $100, and another thing is $200 000, and there are good engineering reasons for choosing one or the other, I like to think that they are technically different. Technically they are about $199,900 different :p
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And if you go cheap and the $100 one breaks, then it ends up costing you $2,699,800,100 more than the $200,000 chip.
 
Krenum said:
Yeah man, you don't understand. The joke, you missed it. I'll admit, it was a bad one.

I understood why they did it. I read the article before I commented. If anyone is jumping directly into something, its you.
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GDI.
You are right. I missed the rolling eyes :banghead: . not a bad joke just me not paying attention
Well I guess that on is on me... Dumbass beer next time you are in dallas? :wheristhesmileythatholdsabeerglass:
 
SvenBent said:
GDI.
You are right. I missed the rolling eyes :banghead: . not a bad joke just me not paying attention
Well I guess that on is on me... Dumbass beer next time you are in dallas? :wheristhesmileythatholdsabeerglass:
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Haha, no worries man. Were all a little stressed out these days. I'm always in the DFW area.
 
sfsuphysics said:
And if you go cheap and the $100 one breaks, then it ends up costing you $2,699,800,100 more than the $200,000 chip.
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The Russians cheaped out on their Phobos-Grunt probe and look how well that went, died in orbit hours after leaving the atmosphere when cosmic rays cooked the CPU. The chips may be expensive but the amount of testing that goes into them is insane I mean they put them in particle accelerators and bombard them with everything they can then test the results to ensure that no damage was done. Rinse and repeat for a bunch of different angles and there you go, there are also pathway redundancies in case their shielding isn't up to snuff and 200K suddenly looks like a bargain especially when a few billion and a decade of work rides on it not fucking up.
 
mouacyk said:
Yikes. What's it gonna be like for a human then, and neurons?
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It's not going to be good but it is possible long term. The radiation isn't high enough that a short time on the surface would make any meaningful impact on your health. However if we were to have people there more long term we'd have to have somewhere shielded for them to live. They're thinking more along the lines of a colony underground of some sort. Once we get that far anyway.

For astronauts to spend a couple days or even a week would be a bit of dose but nothing horrible. They'd be suffer far more in the trip there and back.
 
KazeoHin said:
I know there is probably a reason but I have to ask: Why? surely a cheaper and more efficient product exists than an old PowerPC on a micrometer process.
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Given that a lot of PowerPC processors were used in elcheapo embedded things, it might be extremely cheap.
 
mouacyk said:
Yikes. What's it gonna be like for a human then, and neurons?
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now this is just on memory on an article I read way back so take this with a grain of salt
but I remember them going over how different radiation hit us differently and some radiation while severely a problem for electronic posed no issues for humans and vice versa.
no idea if that is the case here but its still interesting to put in the context of your questions that humans and electronics has way different radiation danger profiles
 
THRESHIN said:
It's not going to be good but it is possible long term. The radiation isn't high enough that a short time on the surface would make any meaningful impact on your health. However if we were to have people there more long term we'd have to have somewhere shielded for them to live. They're thinking more along the lines of a colony underground of some sort. Once we get that far anyway.

For astronauts to spend a couple days or even a week would be a bit of dose but nothing horrible. They'd be suffer far more in the trip there and back.
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Right, and that's why for the trip there and back, we're either going with water for shielding, or working on something like this:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/space-radiation-shields-iss-2019

Humans can't be built with the redundancies of electronics (so we have to add more creative layers)
 
mouacyk said:
Yikes. What's it gonna be like for a human then, and neurons?
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As long as we do not receive more than a hundred or so Millisieverts of Radiation an hour, our DNA chain Polymerases can repair subsequent damage quite well. A 15 min session in starlight from El Sol can give you anywhere from 10 to 100 mSieverts of radiation and our repair mechanisms are perfectly able to cope. And yes that is ionizing if its cosmic and or xray. Almost all xray from cosmic and Sol is blocked by our ionosphere but a portion does make it through. Thats where the low mSv count is coming from according to my old physics professor.
 
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