Orion spaceship uses 12-year-old processor

Many people who follow the development of the space sphere have little interest in small things, like a computer system installed on spacecraft. But in vain - a lot of interesting things can open here. For example, the latest Orion spaceship, which NASA plans to go to the Moon and Mars, has a 12-year-old processor, the PowerPC 750FX.

In principle, this news will not surprise those people who remember that NASA was looking for parts of the Shuttle computer system at the end of their life almost at the collapse of the radio market (in the end, all this was purchased from used electronics sections on eBay and other resources) . And all because the engineers of spacecraft electronic systems prefer to use repeatedly proven solutions, rather than new products that may fail at the most inopportune moment.

That's why Orion uses the IBM PowerPC 750FX.which first appeared on the market in 2002. The PowerPC platform was used on Apple computers before the corporation decided to switch to the x86 architecture. Since then, PowerPC has not been widely used, but in 2003, some models of the iBook G3 installed exactly the processor that now works in Orion. The characteristics of this processor are few that can impress: the 750FX operates at a frequency of 900 MHz with a bus frequency of 166 MHz and 512 KB of L2 cache. The processor was created using 130 nm technology (for comparison, 14 nm manufacturing process is used in the production of the Core M processor family).



Judging by the performance, the 750FX and ARM chips used in the Samsung Galaxy SIII are approximately equal.

The Orion computer system is reliably protected; the most stable components, including the 750FX, were used to create it. By the way, in case you need to reboot the system, the ship has a backup computer (the reboot takes about 20 seconds, which is too much for a space flight). In case something happens to the backup system, the engineers also provided for a third system. Thus, in Orion everything was done with a large margin, experts tried to anticipate any surprises, including increased levels of radiation.

Each on-board system has two PowerPC 750FX chips. At the same time, the systems work by checking the accuracy of each other’s calculations, as well as the correct operation of various blocks. The systems have identical software installed. If something goes wrong (for example, a failure due to radiation), the main system reboots, and the backup comes into operation.