The Orion spacecraft uses a 12-year-old processor.

Many people who follow the development of the space sphere have little interest in trifles, such as a computer system installed on spacecraft. And in vain - there can open up a lot of interesting things. For example, on the newest Orion spacecraft, which according to NASA’s plan should go to the Moon and Mars, a 12-year-old processor, the PowerPC 750FX, is installed.



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

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That is why the Orion uses the IBM PowerPC 750FX , which first hit the market in 2002. The PowerPC platform was used in Apple computers before the corporation decided to switch to the x86 architecture. Since then, PowerPC is not enough where they are used, but in 2003, in some models of iBook G3, a processor was installed which now works in Orion. The characteristics of this processor are not enough for anyone to impress: 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 by another 130 nm technology (for comparison, the 14 nm technical 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 750FX, were used to create it. By the way, in case you need to reboot the system, there is a backup computer on the ship (the reboot lasts about 20 seconds, which is too much for a space flight). In case something happens to the backup system, the engineers provided for a third system. Thus, in Orion everything is done with a large margin, the experts tried to anticipate any surprises, including an increased level of radiation.



Each onboard system has two PowerPC 750FX chips. In this case, the systems work by checking the accuracy of each other's calculations, as well as the correctness of the work of various units. On systems installed identical software. If something goes wrong (for example, there was a malfunction due to radiation), the main system reboots and the backup system comes into operation.