Orion spacecraft powered by single-core processor previously found in iBook G3
NASA's Orion spacecraft successfully completed its first test flight last week and is poised to herald a new era in manned spaceflight, opening the door to deep space flights. While the project is breaking new ground, it is doing so on the back of trustworthy technology that's been around for years, reports Geek.com. Most notable to Apple fans is the PowerPC 750X chip which first hit the market in 2002 and is similar to the processor Apple used in the 2003 iBook G3.
The Orion flight computer is decidedly old school --- it's manufactured with a 130nm process (as compared to a 20nm process for Apple's A8) and features a single-core PowerPC processor clocked at 900MHz. The chip also includes a 166MHz bus and 512KB L2 cache. It's on par performance-wise with mobile phones from a few years ago.
Though old, the processor has some modern enhancements to make it suitable for the space flight. Additions include thicker circuit boards for the rough environment, vibration resistant fasteners for the sometimes bumpy ride and shielding to protect the system from radiation damage. Each computer has two PowerPC 750FX processors to error check each other, and there are three computers on board, providing redundancy if one system required a reboot or failed.
