Q: NASA's $2.5bn Curiosity rover: An Apple PowerBook on wheels

And who said PowerPC was dead?

Calls to mind the old RAF saying: "if it works it's obsolete".

That's because NASA uses PowerPC software and the vendor refuses to rewrite it for Intel!

TEXAS! Mac Man - Howdy neighbor! (Park Forest - you know where it is methinx)

RE: the PPC in the rover (back on topic) - my guess is that the design cycle began around the 750MHz and they were afraid to change it as the project progressed (Murphy's and Unintended Consequences Laws). I still use my Pismo regularly, antiquated as it is. Michael Lax is probably right that whoever wrote the software wouldn't rewrite to Intel because of said Laws.

Got me to thinking about the claim that the Apollo 13 had basically a TI pocket calculator for computing. Checking on it, found this:

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Quote:

To put smartphone progress into perspective, Otellini said a smartphone today has more computing power than all of NASA did when it put a man on the moon in 1969.

To me, that's an astounding claim (even though I realize a lot more of the work depended on individuals than on computers back then).

Otellini is Intel CEO, so I'm sure this is not a frivolous claim.

Does anyone know specifically what partiular parameter was compared here?  Maybe FLOPS?  

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SNIP (poster's name)

  There may be an element of hyperbole, but it's relatively defendable.  The typical processor of the time was on the order of a COSMAC 1602 (8-bit processor with maybe about 100 KIPS and maybe 4kB of core memory).  That was about the level of processing in the nav computer on Apollo 13.

A smartphone would be running over 500 MIPS with 64 GB of flash, and a couple of GB of RAM.  However, its graphics processor can probably do about 10x that throughput, albeit, more narrowly focused on pixel processing, rather than general purpose processing.

In 1982, 3 years after the first moon landing, our corporate timeshared CRAY-1 was rated around 80 MFLOPS.  This was for a company with about $1 billion annual sales.  One would have expected NASA to have a few CRAY-1s around, but the typical graphics processor alone blows a CRAY-1 out of the water just displaying a complex splash screen.

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EDIT - Almost forgot, calculator legend is true.

Best to all

CCC