Mars Rover Curiosity: Less Brainpower Than Apple's iPhone 5 256
Nerval's Lobster writes "To give the Mars Rover Curiosity the brains she needs to operate took 5 million lines of code. And while the Mars Science Laboratory team froze the code a year before the roaming laboratory landed on August 5, they kept sending software updates to the spacecraft during its 253-day, 352 million-mile flight. In its belly, Curiosity has two computers, a primary and a backup. Fun fact: Apple's iPhone 5 has more processing power than this one-eyed explorer. 'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld."
Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, good comparison.
Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on code for a very specific purpose compared to anything else.
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Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on code
The OS running on the phone didn't just spring out of nowhere. If you add up all the development time spent on the code running on an OOTB iPhone 5 what do you think would be the cost?
Indeed, why not compare batteries as well? (Score:5, Funny)
Mars rover: lasts for years. iPhone barely makes it through the day.
Or how about speed? Mars rover several meters a day. iPhone, just sits there.
User upgrades in the field? Mars rover: zero. iPhone: zero.
Yeah yeah, you have more computing power in your pocket then in NASA machine. That was a fun stat for voyager news briefings. A decade ago. It is not funny anymore, it is just sad and a sign the reporter in question has no idea about tech. This stuff is for morning tv.
Re:Just goes to show. . .People are stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, I kept laughing at the MHz / GHz wars in the smartphone arena the last 18 months and couldn't help but nearly choke when I looked at solid integer / floating point performance and saw most of this wiz-bang 1 GHz Dual core stuff still getting stomped by stuff in the PII-450 / PIII-600 range (as I recall Atom started as more or less a process shrunk and trimmed down PIII with some of the Core series improvements and modularity grafted in).
It's a little weird to consider how much I wish there was a popular Atom x86 based Android in the US. Seriously, running Android and doing ARM emulation, they still stomp the ARM stuff. I wish Intel marketing would have some of their late 90's spirit and push themselves into the US smartphone industry with slogans like, "faster than ARM... at running ARM." Mind you, I actually mostly hate Intel. Nothing to inspire hatred like their GPU driver mess on Windows and Linux.
(From a year back) http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones [anandtech.com]
Re:Just goes to show. . .People are stupid (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is that integer performance isn't worth wasting the silicone on in a mobile processor. It is already well beyond "good enough". What does count is power consumption, where ARM is still in another league to x86, and in floating point operations. ARM has NEON SIMD instructions for that and they are pretty good for audio/video processing and games. In addition a lot of stuff is handed off to the GPU now anyway (transform and lighting, video decoding) which is always going to be far more efficient.
There is a reason there are not many x86 mobile devices. Atom is more expensive and hard to get good battery life from. Raw performance is good but having four low power cores and a good GPU is better for providing a smooth user experience and mobile games.
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Indeed, I kept laughing at the MHz / GHz wars in the smartphone arena the last 18 months and couldn't help but nearly choke when I looked at solid integer / floating point performance and saw most of this wiz-bang 1 GHz Dual core stuff still getting stomped by stuff in the PII-450 / PIII-600 range (as I recall Atom started as more or less a process shrunk and trimmed down PIII with some of the Core series improvements and modularity grafted in).
Atom is not a PIII. It is closer to the original P54C (Pentium), but not very close (Larrabee is far closer, but still heavily modified). The main argument for this is that the PIII, as a descendent of the Pentium Pro, was out of order. All released Atoms so far are in-order, but they are on the other hand both wider, far more well-cached and better at branch prediction than the original Pentium. Basically, they do a lot to bring down the latencies that can arise from an in-order architecture.
Re:Just goes to show. . .People are stupid (Score:4)
The A6 and A6X are in the same speed range as the high-end G5's and low end CoreSolos (and a few CoreDuos) from 6 years ago. And yes, it is very impressive, especially when you consider the power, heat, size, cooling, and price differences between them. It also makes you wonder about the future, in 6 years will we have Sandy Bridge i5 level performance in our phones?
It's truly phenomenal. And then you realize that this power, heat, size, price, cooling savings also includes an impressive GPU as well.
Sure, there are various sorts of things to consider beyond benchmarks and such, but it's quite impressive no matter how you look at it. And even if the specific details for the story in question, PPC 750 (I'm assuming that because you are referencing it, that's what's in Curiosity), vs an A6 SoC isn't a fair fight, I do think most people (including most Slashdot nerds) would either be surprised, or at least find it an interesting tidbit, that the processing power of the solar system's most advanced robot is dwarfed by an everyday consumer phone used by millions. Even those of us who understand the process through which technology is tested, selected, hardened, and programmed for, how reliability and consistency is preferred over raw performance, how embedded processors aren't taxed in the same way desktop, or even mobile, systems are taxed, etc., how even we can see the unique and notable dynamic here.
The impressive part isn't the speed, it's the fact the A6 in the iPhone 5 is running with the same 3.7v 1400mah battery in the original 412mhz iPhone. That's like throwing the supercharged V8 in your car but still getting 50mpg Prius numbers.
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Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked on government systems two decades ago that had four-decade old technology and worked great. Why? All the user interface agony was offloaded to dedicated consoles.
Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you're doing it in a modern software package like C# for example, there's little to no difference at all. I could write a stopwatch app... and the gui would have a single button and a display. The console version of which would be a lot harder to write. It all depends on what you're doing. Most GUIs make it easy to write for them, and offload a lot of their load onto the GPU.
By the way, Curiosity's UI is still on earth... and on dozens of different computers at Nasa. It's kind of silly to say curiosity is only powered by this tiny processor.... that processor is just accepting and implementing commands. All the data crunching is happening back here on earth by massive banks of computers.
P.S. Apple probably paid them to say this.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
... and where do you think the code to display that button came from? Not from C#, but from the .NET or Mono environment... which is... more code!
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They should have given us the specs of Curiosity's GPU.
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By the way, Curiosity's UI is still on earth... and on dozens of different computers at Nasa. It's kind of silly to say curiosity is only powered by this tiny processor.... that processor is just accepting and implementing commands.
It's also done an "apt-get dist-upgrade" remotelely, by design. Cool bot.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:4, Informative)
I've never seen a processor whose machine code had lines.
Segments.
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Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
Do I get to use GNU readline and ncurses? If not then I'd rather code to the GUI. Seriously, you're kidding yourself if you think terminal discovery, terminal emulation, META-DATA for Signaling & Control within the char stream (escapes), even dynamic resizing, and KEYBOARD SCANCODE TRANSLATIONS are a walk in the park. Seriously, write your own OS from scratch, all that UI stuff (even for a console only OS) is every bit as complex as the GUI stuff. In fact, ncurses keeps multiple off-screen buffers
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:4, Informative)
A typical command line program simply reads data from STDIN, parameter values from argv[], and writes some values to STDOUT, maybe some error messages to STDERR. Command line programs don't care if the user is a human being or a script, unlike a ncurses program, whose fancy display formatting is all about human interactivity, but is often difficult to script.
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Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
What a stupid question. What are your priorities; pretty or correct?
"Should I launch the missile now or not?" You can ask that question at the command line (defaulting to yes, no, or maybe), or you can offer the user a pop-up window which would do the same.
Choices, choices, choices, ... Why do I so often feel like I'm in a Douglas Adams novel?
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
". . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are."
That's certainly true. And the huge volume of our data, too, but mostly software. I have programs on my computer that are easily 20 times the size of entire hard drive of one of our office computers back in 1994... and that hard drive contained a complete install of Microsoft Office as well as Lotus 1-2-3 for those who didn't like Excel. With lots of room to spare. As a long-time programmer, I celebrate the increases in capability we have seen over the years, but I decry the bloated inefficiency of much of our modern software. I would go so far as to say I am dismayed by it sometimes.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, it just goes to show how far behind the performance card the radiation hardened, military/aerospace grade equipment is.
Plus, you really don't want to be bleeding edge on this sort of stuff. Discovering a mission ending critical CPU bug when you're astronomical scale distance away = bad.
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Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Funny)
After a mistake like that, you've got to hand in your geek curve.
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But geeks are never allowed to touch curves.
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I think elliptic curves are OK, in the context of cryptography, debates about 100-page math proofs, etc.
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I handed that in long ago when i started sleeping with women and being gainfully employed :D
You're lying. Otherwise, what would you still do here on Slashdot? :-)
So... (Score:5, Funny)
... not enough power to run Angry Birds then?
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Not even enough power for Mildly Peeved Birds, Canadian edition.
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No, and especially not Angry Birds SPACE Edition.
iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the iPhone 5 may have more processing power... But I bet if you put that thing in space, the first cosmic ray that comes along will happily crash the OS. Game over.
Hardware in spaecraft has to be hardened big time against radiation. Off the shelf junk will NOT work. Just sayin'.
power use and battery life have to be deal with as (Score:4, Insightful)
power use and battery life have to be dealt with as well.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:5, Funny)
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Off the shelf junk works in space all the time. Processing power is unrelated to radiation shielding.
Lack of processor power has to do with qualification processes and lead times. Your pitiful opinion is misdirected and uninformed.
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Off the shelf junk works in space all the time. Processing power is unrelated to radiation shielding.
Lack of processor power has to do with qualification processes and lead times. Your pitiful opinion is misdirected and uninformed.
OTS works in the Earth's magnetosphere. Get outside of that and you have to start making major design compromises, particularly with RAM.
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Off the shelf junk works in space all the time. Processing power is unrelated to radiation shielding.
Lack of processor power has to do with qualification processes and lead times. Your pitiful opinion is misdirected and uninformed.
Well, there are sound arguments for why smaller manufacturing proceses would inherently be more radiation sensitive, so saying that the two are unrelated is a bit misleading.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:4)
There's space, and then there's space. LEO is not really much of space, because you're in the magnetosphere bubble. Get into interplanetary space and things change very drastically. Radiation (cosmic ray) doses go up by 3-4 orders of magnitude. You have no clue what you're talking about.
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Hardware in spaecraft has to be hardened big time against radiation. Off the shelf junk will NOT work. Just sayin'.
And yet, the HTC Nexus One has passed many of those tests [engadget.com] without much problems.
If OS crashes, just reboot it (Score:2)
Not so much cosmic rays (Score:3, Informative)
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Sure, the iPhone 5 may have more processing power... But I bet if you put that thing in space, the first cosmic ray that comes along will happily crash the OS. Game over.
Yes, probably... but you could send up a dozen iPhone 5s in a box, all running the same software, set to auto-reboot-on-crash, and have the rover use whatever results the majority of the phones agree on. The iPhone RAIP array would be smaller, faster, and more reliable than what they are using now.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:4, Informative)
Cosmic rays [wikipedia.org] go straight through the earths atmosphere.
They absolutely do not, as the article you cite makes clear in its second sentence. Sheesh.
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That's the reality distortion field, which is more powerful than the magnetosphere.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
Cosmic rays go straight through the earths atmosphere.
No, it doesn't. If that were true we'd be all dead. Comic radiation in interplanetary space is 400 to 900 mSv annually, which is 1000 to 2200 times stronger than dosage at sea level on Earth (0.4 mSv). Earth's atmosphere blocks most radiation below 1 GeV.
Off the shelf computer hardware does indeed work just fine in space. You can watch people on the ISS using normal laptops and cameras all the time.
That's because ISS is in LEO and thus is still protected by the thermosphere and Earth's magnetic field. On a trip to Mars neither of those protections would be available.
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6 digit UID
Giving a citation that is contrary to your post
Being moderated offtopic
Your sig bemoaning 'unfair' modding
I'm lovin' it.
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It's not outdated by 20 years. The CPU is a RAD750, based on PPC750 which means it's roughly equivalent to a PPC G3 so the thing has a similar amount of power to the original iMac. That's leaps and bounds over the 386s that NASA used to use.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:4, Informative)
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On the iss astronauts can do hands on troubleshooting, and if the worst happens they can just fly replacement parts in the next resupply mission.
So if the ISS blows up and each chunk survives reentry and smashes a different nuclear plant, causes dozens of meltdowns simultaneously across the Earth we'll just fly some parts up on the next resupply?
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OBLIGITORY: no rolling alligator filled wall of flame? [xkcd.com]
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Whatever. I wish I had that massive trainset.
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You mean Earth's magnetosphere. If it were within the atmosphere enough to be protected by it, it would never be able to remain in order due to drag.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iss#Radiation [wikipedia.org]
space qual/rad tolerant (Score:5, Informative)
You're conflating serveral things..
Space Qualification doesn't have a lot to do with rad hardening. It's more about manufacturing processes, reliability, and testing to work over wide temps. That off the shelf computer probably won't work at -40C or +75C, while the processors in most spacecraft do. ISS or shuttle isn't a good example: it's basically an office environment: it even has *air*.
Rad hardening is something else. And the space processors *ARE* more successful at hardening than garden variety CPUs. Take a look at the LEON3FT SPARC core, for instance (Available commercially as the Atmel AT697 or the Aeroflex UT699, or you can burn it into an Actel RTAX2000, if you like). It has register paths that have error correction, etc. The demonstrated performance in a radiation environment *is* better than the non FT version.
There's single event upsets (SEU) aka "bit flips" which EDAC or parity works nicely for. Your laptop flipping a bit might not be a big deal.. most consumer software has enough bugs and things that you just restart and move on. If the processor controlling the rocket motors during entry descent and landing screws up it's a $2.5B hole in the ground. So internal registers in the space CPUs tend to be triple redundant or other upset mitigations.
But that's really not the big issues. There are things like Latch-Up.. that particle going through causes a latchup, and the resulting high current at a small location melts the chip. Oops, dead. There are latchup immune designs and processes, and there are latchup monitor/reset circuits, but it's not universal.
There's single event gate rupture (SEGR) which is where a MOSFET gate gets punctured because the normal charge on it is close to the failure level in normal operation, and the particle deposits just enough more to push it over the edge. Would you notice this on a modern CPU? Maybe it's in the microcode for calculating square root or something and you wouldn't for a long long time.
We use a lot of FPGAs in spacecraft these days.. If it's a xilinx, that particle can flip a configuration bit, and now you've just programmed your FPGA to have two outputs connected to the same "wire" and they have opposite values. Oops some dead gates now, or if it's bad enough dead chip.
ISS is a benign radiation environment.. about a Rad(Si) per year or so. There are *humans* on ISS, after all. After all 600 Rad will kill someone in days, 100 Rad will make them pretty sick. A typical design dose for a Mars mission might be 20kRad. For going to Jupiter, maybe a MegaRad?
But even in that benign radiation environment, a lot of COTS equipment will fail, and there's no way to predict, short of test. So they take all those COTS widgets and run them in a proton beam and figure out what the mean time til failure is. If it's long enough, you send it up to ISS and have at it. There's an awful lot of stuff that has "expected life on ISS" of something like 90-180 days. Google for the papers or look at the website http://www.klabs.org where a lot of this stuff is collected. 180 days on ISS is plenty if you're sending new stuff up on a regular basis. Even at $100k/kilo, that's pretty inexpensive to just send a new iPad up every few months if one dies.
If you're sending a billion bucks to Mars for 10 years, I think you might want something a bit better.
Re:iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
This is the computer chip in the Mars Rover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 [wikipedia.org]
Specifically, they're using two *133Mhz chips rated for 1 Megarad.
1 Megarad is about double the hardening they actually required,
but I'm guessing they overspecced so that the Mars Science Laboratory will outlast its planned mission length.
Anyways, if you're in low earth orbit (like the space station) you can get away with radiation tolerant electronics.
But out in cold hard space, without the earth's atmosphere, you need radiation hardened electronics.
*Not 200Mhz as so many articles are quoting
Most satellites and space based processors are no more successful at
hardening than your garden variety laptops. They just program them better and watch for memory errors.
What? If it was that simple, we'd be using modern processes, instead of technology that debuted in 1997.
Instead, it's quite the opposite, where a modern 24nm process is impossible to harden to the same strength as an old 150nm process.
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Actually its not a Myth. I work for an aerospace company, specifically in electronics HW design, and specifically for satellites (we built some of the instruments on Hubble as well as the spacecraft bus for several DigitalGlobe birds).
Its not immediate "cosmic rays" that get you.. its the long term rad exposure that a satellite gets over its intended life. The problem is aging effects and end of life performance. We do rad testing on all our flight level parts and derate the performance and then design so a
So? (Score:2)
The iPod isn't expected to survive the same environment.
Sometimes ruggedness beats clock cycles.
--
BMO
Misleading (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Line Replaceable Unit, meaning it's an unit that can be swapped out quickly.
Somehow I don't think that term really applies here...
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Um, no. The flight computers (prime and backup) on the Shuttle were IBM AP-101 - if they went, it was game over as the Shuttle was fly-by-wire. No handheld toy need apply.
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What a waste (Score:3)
And yet, from my observations, all the iPhone is ever used for is cutting virtual rope and tweeting (low-res) pictures of food. Seems like quite a waste by comparison.
Hubble upgraded to 486 (Score:2)
That shouldn't impress anyone. (Score:4, Insightful)
Voyager 1/2 could run about 100K instructions per second, maybe less.
It's about the objective, not raw processing power.
And this is a fine opportunity! to pour some of my bile about the miserly state in which modern software is.
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Voyager 1/2 could run about 100K instructions per second, maybe less.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was about the same, I believe. Emulating it in real time takes about 2% of a 3GHz Pentium-4.
Lots more eyes than one (Score:4, Informative)
There's a reason (Score:2)
Years back I read that NASA uses older, battle tested chips rather than going with cutting edge hardware that might crap out on you from an obscure bug.
heh yea but (Score:5, Funny)
Curiosity's computer(s) can handle extreme cold and radiation of space while keeping radio communication for millions of miles, An iPhone is prone to overheat during normal use and has had trouble sending a radio signal though your hand.
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So? (Score:5, Funny)
Lets compare, shall we?
iPhone - sometimes flaky signal. Curiosity - working from millions of miles away. WIN Curiosity.
iPhone - works on Earth within range of cell towers. Curiosity - working on frakking Mars. WIN Curiosity.
iPhone - 1 day power life. Curiosity - radioactive power pack. WIN Curiosity.
iPhone - plays games, makes calls, takes pictures of girls making duck faces. Curiosity - scientifically explores and photographs another planet. WIN Curiosity.
iPhone - will shatter if you handle it wrong. Curiosity - dropped onto another world and still going. As designed. WIN Curiosity.
Curiosity, doing way the hell more, with way the hell less.
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Hmmm... I am ...curious... about this thing you describe.
I would like to order one on a 2 year plan.
way back in 2008... (Score:4, Interesting)
Way back in 2008 most of the hardware and software development was complete, so it should be compared to the original iPhone or the iPhone 3G.
Reliable devices lag consumer devices (Score:3)
Devices prepped for the harsh environments will take longer to build than consumer devices, so the spec gets frozen sooner.
Plus, as long as it has enough horsepower, why mess with the design to upgrade it?
P.S. This is not really a new observation. Consider PhoneSat, the project to take an off-the-shelf Android phone and use it as the heart of a micro-satellite. Clearly the processing power is enough, plus they can use the camera, inertial sensors, and I guess even GPS. (I wonder if the GPS software can cope with orbital altitude?)
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/home/PhoneSat.html [nasa.gov]
Not needing a foolproof UI is most of it (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:2)
Most one-eyed explorers (Score:2)
... aren't as smart as they think they are.
Compare it to Nintendo, Atari? (Score:2, Informative)
The explanation is simple (Score:3)
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Even if you look at the computers on things like the F-15 you will see small memories and slow CPUs. It takes time and a lot of money to get something like a spacecraft or radar system verified. You use what you know works. If an 8085 will do the mission why not use it?
who cares about the *software*? (Score:2)
Rovers still have the best hardware
This one's even got a laser tough enough to blast rocks. It's gonna be awhile before we see a cell phone with those kind of specs.
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This one's even got a laser tough enough to blast rocks. It's gonna be awhile before we see a cell phone with those kind of specs.
Forget cell phones, I'm waiting for sharks!
iPhone 5? (Score:2)
Phew. I must be getting old. It feels like it was just yesterday that computing power was measured in VIC-20's. Now days it seems iPhones are a unit of speed, weight, pixel density *and* marketshare.
It doesn't bode well for metrification...
That's Pretty Common in Aerospace (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there any point to this article? This seems like one of those "your desktop has more power than the space shuttle" type shits of the 90's.
But it HAS to work (Score:2)
Two reasons why the older hardware is better
(1) It has to work - that is why you go in for older (read: more tested) hardware. What happens if a bug in the code causes a crash a million miles from home? You can't pull out the battery (oops, you can't do that for the iPhone either ;) ) - and reboot.
(2) Who cares whether the processing power is greater? What matters is whether the hardware can support the software to do what the system was designed for (which in the rover case is fixed). You use the most REL
Horse Bull (Score:2)
"Processing Power", what, at S.T.P.? Spherical frog in the microwave anyone?
Under some forms of ideal conditions, perhaps. But think about what it'd take to get a stupid rubber case/cover for Curiosity?
Take your beloved iPhone, take it out of the case, use it for the same 253 days (I actually don't know anyone who's used a single iPhone for that long, by the way), and see how that processing power manages to endure on the 254th day. No protector; just your pocket, and the keys in your pocket. Don't lose
This has always been the case. (Score:2)
I remember when 386/486 were still being sent up in space when current PC processors were many times faster. (still are?) They were tested, protected, and proven. Ask yourself this. Do you buy the newest process off Newegg (or whatever) and send it into space hoping it doesn't fail at a price of $500 million or in Curiosity's case $2.5 billion? Umm, hell no.
How about "17-eyed explorer"? (Score:2)
Curiosity has 17 cameras [nasa.gov], not one.
I mean, if you're coing to criticize, get it right.
These types of comparisons are flawed (Score:2)
On the surface these comparisons are interesting but when you understand how these systems were designed you'll see it's not accurate. Curiosity is an example of an embedded system. The code that runs on it is only meant to operate the rover and its instruments. Comparing its hardware to a general purpose computer meant to run various applications is flawed. And because their purposes are different so are their operating systems.
The last time I read about VxWorks and a Mars rover had to do with Pathfinder.
Earth to Mars ... (Score:2)
"To give the Mars Rover Curiosity the brains it needs ...
FTFY!!!111 It's a fucking machine! $deity, I hate this PC garbage! THINK!
Marvin (Score:3)
Here I am, brain the size of a mars rover, and they tell me to text 'OMG grl, wassup'....
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They could be just continuing the tradition of referring to ships as "she".
While they people running the mission do not depend on the rover for their livelihood the way sailors depended on their ship, I'm assuming it's still a group of mostly men working together over a long time period.
I would probably go with "it" myself, though.
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Tut, tut! Don't assume! Go to Mars, turn her over, and check!
Re:The title is so obvious (Score:4, Informative)
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. . . because sometimes, Libraries of Congress aren't appropriate as units.
You could, however, measure total processing power as number of Libraries of Congress filled with iPhones. Which would make just amount sense of comparing a Mars Rover to a smart phone in the first place . . .
Re:Why do they always have to refer to the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld.
Re:what about the cost? (Score:5, Funny)
Well you have to factor in the shipping cost...
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You ever been to Titusville?