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Mars Rover Curiosity: Less Brainpower Than Apple's iPhone 5
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."
. . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
... not enough power to run Angry Birds then?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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'.
The iPod isn't expected to survive the same environment.
Sometimes ruggedness beats clock cycles.
--
BMO
This is misleading. The rover has dozens of LRUs, all individually computing sensory input, crunching it, and sending it across the bus for the main computer to process. Yet it's only taking into account the main computer's processing power.
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.
power use and battery life have to be dealt with as well.
The Mars Rover is now a She? Could it ever have been a He?
No. The Rover is an It.
In the frenzy to be politically correct, mistakes are made I guess.
And the Hubble Space Telescope was upgraded to an 80486 during one of the shuttle maintenance missions.
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.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Nitpick with the summary: the rover is not 'one eyed'. It uses a bunch: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/eyesandother/ That said, it does have that one big laser on its head: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/spectrometers/chemcam/ Robots on Mars with lasers. It doesn't get much better.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
That's what my wife calls mine.
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Fun fact: Apple's iPhone 5 has more processing power than this one-eyed explorer.
Never mind that iPhone's source code is closed. I don't dispute the fact above.
My trouble though is on the constant reference to Apple's device as if a generic term like "Smart Phone" would not suffice!
Personally, I am tired of seeing the term "iPhone" day in and day out. I am tired!
Can anyone refute 'my fact that' any smart phone has more processing power then the the one-eyed explorer?
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.
My friend is on the team for one of several cameras.
I'll give Curiosity the gold medal any day.
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.
IPhone in my pocket also costs $650, how much did that rover thing cost?
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.
Better double check your figures. Curiosity launched November of 2011. Just landed August of 2012.
Why do these Nasa rovers have stripper names?
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I've written an universal autopilot in 2007 that fits in 32K of eeprom. I say that not to brag, but to mean that these things are not unusual. Software on PLCs and so on is often very small -- it also has to be very good at not crashing. Fortunately that's all it has to be: nobody cares if the scroll bar doesn't glow when it's hit the end and so on, it just has to keep the power plant working :)
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Why does it matter at all? It doesn't matter the relative processing power of my phone, there's a hell of a lot more to it than processing power. Like the simple fact that my phone isn't on a different planet.
... aren't as smart as they think they are.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I think it's interesting to think about alternate approaches to radiation hardening though. If they can just get small circuits to not take *permanent* damage from cosmic rays, then we're on the verge of 16nm transistors where you can have the whole circuit run the operation in 4x parallel with per-instruction parity checks.. kind of an ECC for CPU cores.. Or maybe a system that detects voltage spikes in the power-- Haswell's architecture could build in something like this for the first time-- and identifies which component got hit, and just re-run the last thing that happened there..
Offloaded conscious brain processing to Siri.
Takes worthless pictures.
Can't figure out way to San Jose.
Apple released ios 6.01 and 6.02 to fix connectivity problems with the iphone5. Its kinda hard plugging the rover into itunes to perform updates for connectivity problems.
I could compare the software used in the Statue of Liberty to any phone on the market, and create the same headline.
Gently reply
The cold fact is just that running a rich graphical UI, games, etc. can actually require more horsepower than some serious science stuff, even though the latter might seem more demanding.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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...
Log in or piss off.
The last thing on Earth that I desire is mobile empowerment. I find I have more than enough power as it is; often quite sufficient to cause me all sorts of hassles later. But yes progress is kinda cool. In college (1966) we had one of the first 'home' video setups, the camera was about the max size of a suitcase for checked airline baggage and weighed God only knows what it was on wheels; the recorder was about the size and weight of a washing machine; the media might fit in a bread box but I doubt it; and the whole thing cost us about $20,000.00 USD. There's a cell phone on my desk here (in case CommunistCast ISP goes down, uncommon but far from surprising); it was free and does video better; its half the size of a cigarette pack...the studio rig we bought was paid for by the USG, we got a grant to hire hookers and a suite to make a porn movie, for a class capstone project; made a profit selling 'the only copy' of the results to our customers, whose funds we (being gentlemen) let the working folks keep..
They design those things so far in advance that they're pretty much obsolete as they're sitting on the launch pad. For all that the images coming back are pretty amazing, the CCD it's packing really isn't that great. If they started designing a new one now, by the time they go to launch it we'll all have lightfield 3-D infinitely zoomable cameras on our pocket-Watsons.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Have you checked out the wireless coverage map for Gale Crater on Mars? iPhone - zilch, no signal. Not even roaming. AT&T and Verizon are nowhere to be found. But Curiosity - good signal everywhere. That's why my next phone contract will be with NASA's Deep Space Network.
Is that what they're trying to tell us? That the new stuff is newer than the older stuff?
I've seen this same story so many times since I first began using computers (1974) that I can't possibly count them all.
New stuff is faster than the old stuff! WTF! Who knew that could happen?
And make sure you have more than one running at the same time. SpaceX uses non rad-hardened computers on Dragon, and in their last mission one computer had to reboot due to a radiation hit, but the system works fine since they have redundancy, this is explained in detail here. So no, hardware in spacecraft does not have to be hardened against radiation, and off the shelf junk will work. Of course this doesn't mean you can use iPhone on Mars rover since in Dragon's case it's a short mission and they're under the protection of Earth's magnetic field, it just means you need to design your system in a case by case basis and avoid over-generalization.
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.
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.
Maybe the comparison should be made using power needed by cpu/modules instead. There are no plug sockets in Mars...yet.
Cosmic rays actually interact very little either with the Earth's magnetosphere, atmosphere, or sillicon chips. They're going so fast that they don't hang around long enough to interact with atomic nuclei unless they score a direct hit. There really isn't much difference in cosmic ray exposure between the ground and, say, the surface of the Moon. The real problem is solar weather. The Sun regularly spits out particle blasts that would fry anything made of semiconductors. Those blasts are what power the aurorae. But those charged particles aren't going so fast so they're deflected by the magnetosphere (which is what protects the ISS) and they're also more readily absorbed by the atmosphere, which is why radiation levels at sea level are lower than they are in Denver. If you could get your iPhone and tablet safely out of the solar system, they would probably work fine on a generation starship.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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 RELIABLE hardware to get the mission done. Any additional power/capabilities in the hardware just introduces more points of failure (OTOH, the phone should (ideally) play games that come out in two years, which might require more processing power).
My phone might also have better processing power than the autopilot hardware on most commercial airlines. You need tens of thousands of flight test/real world hours of testing before you can safely use it. Putting in the latest and greatest processor just creates more rooms for error. I would also expect a lot of the code came from other tried-and-tested systems, so you'd like to use the same hardware.
It is like using a hammer to crack a peanut shell. Sure, you get greater force with the hammer. But you have to be very, very careful when using the wrong tool for the job. Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. I don't know of any reasonable person who would even consider using a desktop/laptop/phone processors on mission critical hardware.
and yet, I just use it to commute to work. What a waste.
"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 it, don't drop it, don't crack the screen. Oh yeah, and there are no in-warranty returns either.
And, forget about the mission, it had to survive the stress tests of all of the other components for years.
And the hardware was selected and frozen years before the software was, dumbass.
Oh, and by-the-by, it's controlling a nuclear power plant.
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.
Given the same brainpower. When Curiosity landed and transmitted its first grainy photo, it was not a desktop with icons for us to click on.
Also in a well designed parallel system the smartness exceeds the sum of all the CPUs because there is less context switching.
In biological systems evolution has given us a smooth transition from the highest notion to the lowest impulse and action. This is parallelism on a scale beyond 'massive' because the systems do not just interact in the sense of modules or layers, there are melded patterns of cause and effect. Organisms that throw fatal exceptions have been weeded out. What remains is a thing of majesty and mystery that could never be completely explained by science.
I am speaking of a woman of course, But I digress.
A dog chasing its own tail has more computing power than the iPhone 5. Because it could stop any time it wants to.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
:-) What you did there. I seened it.
Sadly, ICE seized my dakimakura as child pornography. I'll be appearing in court next month to fight this injustice.
I'm glad I'll never touch a woman. Pubic hair is gross.
That could really detect life.
Curiosity has 17 cameras, not one.
I mean, if you're coing to criticize, get it right.
The iPhone 5 has nearly twice the computing power of the Samsung Galaxy (woo-woo!) S3.
In Europe, the S3 is a just tad faster at computing but a relative slug at cellular data (no LTE, you see) compared to the iPhone 5.
Basically Samsung doesn't know how to make a decent smartphone system. They even have to rely on Google for the software and security updates.
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. They had some problems with the rover randomly rebooting once it was on Mars and had to debug it. The problem turned out to be a classic example of priority inversion.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/raj/www/mars.html
the color accuracy of Samsung AMOLED displays is horrendous? Oh, but how kindergartners love the bright colors, though! Colors!!!
"To give the Mars Rover Curiosity the brains it needs ...
FTFY!!!111 It's a fucking machine! $deity, I hate this PC garbage! THINK!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The single core PowerPC 750 designed in 1997 using a 180nm process running at about 400Mhz is slower then the dual-core ARM processor designed in 2011 using a 32nm processes running at 1Ghz, so after twenty years an ARM processors has finally been able to claim their processor is faster than a fifteen year old PowerPC processor. Nice ARM Ltd, you deserve it.
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
I think you mean Opportunity, the twin of the Spirit rover that stopped working a while back. They were solar-powered versus the nuclear-powered Curiosity.
It is like saying this is a better car because it has bigger wheels. Curiosity has the specific computational power to achieve the specific job. Is there any doubt it succeeds doing what it is meant to do ? Why would you hope the CPU is twice or ten times faster ? This idea of an ever faster computer has died on desktops and is almost dead with mobile devices too. Who cares if the iPhone doubles it's computational power. Can it do what it is meant to do without requiring a person to recover it from a hiccup ? Curiosity can !!
They should have used an iPhone.
"Siri, bring me to their leader."
So let's assume it starts collecting materials now and starts building tools. When will it have reached the state where it has a fab suitable for producing larger wafers for itself? How many generations of programmers on Earth will it have burnt through before getting there?
Here I am, brain the size of a mars rover, and they tell me to text 'OMG grl, wassup'....
---
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Many space probes usually include processors and technology levels which are mature at the time of the initial design of the spacecraft, and which are spun of after being mature into a hardened line (probably adjusted structure size).
So:
-Lets say 2-3 years assemly and tests of the total system
-3-x years design phase
-specific design and tests of the hardened line (i dont know, les assume): ~1-2 years
-observing operation of the initial processor in designs on boards at nominal operation speeds to make sure its mature: ~3-5 years (if you look at errata in Microcontroller sheets thats usually when they come in)
So we arrive at something at the order of 11years from the release of the inital part to the start of the space vehicle.
So
-Columbia (start in 1981) had an IBM AP101, with an architecture from the 60s and based on ttl circuits (while the Commodore 64 was around the corner)
-Opportunity (start in 2003) had a version of power-1 processor (1990)
-Curiosity (start in 2011) had a version of a powerPC750 (1997)
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The iPhone was designed to restrict its owners, while Curiosity was designed to enrich all of us.
Nerd with iPhone = not a winning team.
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The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Agreed. Im too lazy to log in, but i am typing this from my transformer tablet and performance is more than good enough @ 1.7ghz and 4 cores. I wish windows was this smooth on my 3ghz i5 laptop. Truth be told i use the tablet far more than my laptop for internet anymore. Its also what i throw in my bag typically.
iPhone 5 - More Powerful than a Space Ship! *fwap* *fwap* *fwap* *jizzzzzzz*
Now OBEY and go buy one.
The Appstore offerings for Curiosity are pitiful. Not even a single fart cushion emulator. What do you need computing power for if there are no apps to be had, anyway?
my iPhone isn't on Mars
Thought so.
And I'm not even getting into allowed temperature ranges, radiation hardening and so on.
Uhm, no. Although that came out around the holidays so it was easy to miss.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6529/busting-the-x86-power-myth-indepth-clover-trail-power-analysis
The new Blackberry 10 OS is derived from QNX, another realtime OS which is superior to VxWorks. QNX is used in all sorts of mission-critical applications, like vehicle electronics including spacecraft, medical electronics, and even nuclear reactor systems. So while IOS may be crap, there are mobile devices out there which have even better OS than the Mars rover.
Blackberry may be behind Apple and Android on apps, but their new OS is really spectacular. All they need now is more apps.
Not sure if you were thinking that the last rover to run a general purpose OS was Pathfinder. MER (Spirit & Opportunity) and MSL (Curiosity) both run VxWorks in the flight computer (Rad6000 for MER, Rad750 for MSL). And MSL and MRO run RTEMS in the UHF radios which have a SPARC V7.
Well sure! The launch date of the Curiosity Rover was November 2011, and everything had to be nailed down before then. Plus, Mars is a really harsh environment, with cosmic rays bombarding the processor and memory. It takes time and effort to create a processor and memory that will stand up to that, and more time and effort to validate it. Your tiny-tiny transistor sizes of 'modern' CPU processors simply wouldn't survive that.
And while you might like to think that your nation's Space Program is well funded, a tiny little 15 billion dollar budget for everything doesn't let you spend like the 700 billion DoD military budget. And one more thing -- the development cost is divided across ONE platform -- not thousands (or millions) of identical iPhone's which can then be upgraded in 6 months. Signed: A Nasa Contractor
Imagine what our desktop computers could do if all the crappy coded software could be converted into the most effecient assembly language possible for your specific machine?
"Our 32nm chip that won't be available for 8 months beats a chip that has been out for a year and made with a 40nm process" Uhm... duh? By that definition, ARM is better than ARM. Hell, AMD is better than intel :P
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/673162main_malin-4-673.jpg
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.
There is no reason for calling machines that probe things --usually having protruding probes... female. if anything they are male if you are going to assign as sex to them. Exploration also doesn't fit with females - it is the males that find new territory which they claim as theirs and often mark it by some means...conquest etc...
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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You've described it pretty accurately. The other factor is a desire to re-use designs (and spare parts) from previous missions. So the Mars 2003 rovers used boards originally designed for Mars Pathfinder (1997 landing), which in turn was launched in 1996. For a typical mission, construction starts about 3 years before launch, prelim design probably a year before that. Phoenix (launch in 2007) was the original Mars '01 spacecraft, which was built as a spare for the ill fated Mars Polar Lander ('99 launch), which started design in 95 or 96 (At Martin Marietta, just as they merged with Lockheed). CDR was in 97. You know that they wouldn't make it through CDR with "new parts" (even in the glory days of Faster Better Cheaper), so I'll bet no part was newer than 1990-ish.
Then the beast may take 4,8,12 years to get where it's going (Cassini,Galileo, Juno), and run for who knows how many years. Better keep all those databooks and design documentation around. (And resist the administrators who keep saying "why do you need to keep that info, isn't it all on the web?".. sure, you go find data sheets for 4000 series CMOS manufactured in the early 90s. They still make the parts, at least with the same number, but the actual part is different)
NASA uses Micrium's OS ( U/COS ) on the Mars curiosity rover.
( NetBurners use the same OS )
Here's the book on it... same one I use.
Note how compact an OS can be if all the "consumer fluff" is not included and the OS simply concentrates on the task to do and what resources it has to allocate.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
You're right, that's impressive, but I did note that dynamic (twice, even):
And yes, it is very impressive, especially when you consider the power, heat, size, cooling, and price differences between them.
That this performance comes with impressive power savings.
Hopefully crashes less too...
The iPhone is capable of accomplishing in a perceived instant what entire rooms full of people would've spent years/decades pre-calculating into data tables a century ago, but as we don't collectively remember those times, the fact that mathematics was rendered a largely brain-free process in the proverbial historic blink-of-an-eye a few decades ago escapes our understanding. While "everyone knows" how powerful modern computers are and how quickly things develop, almost no-one appreciates the true scale of the advances we've enjoyed and how we've employed them in consumer devices.
I once let a user watch while I recompiled a monitoring system I'd written. I was using a command line compiler and the whole thing built in about 5 seconds. Then I ran it under windows and it took about 10 seconds to start running. As you can probably imagine, the user was perplexed by this and my attempts to explain to him the difference in these two operations were thwarted by his preconceptions that effectively put computers on par with magic and made out that anyone who understood them was some kind of Gandalf-like mage, unknowingly powerful and equally unfathomable.
The principle difference that he couldn't/wouldn't get his head around was the labyrinthine complexity of today's graphical, multi-input human-computer interfaces as opposed to the brutal simplicity of the command line. Each has it's target users and the difference in the resources required is an integral part of the suitability equation. Given that the vast majority of everyday computer users still don't understand the simple relationship between their computer, their user account and their password, despite the age of these concepts, I don't think there is any possibility that we will ever establish an appreciation for the true power of modern processors.
tl;dr - The embedded perception of smartphones is that of being a personal magic butler and it's too late to change that.
"hardening" from radiation (and EM bursts). Check out some of the DoD requirements for electronics. Today, some of the latest hi-density RAM chips are subject to spurious daily failures due to occasional radiation. How long would the ARM CPU/RAM/SRAM of an IPhone last on Mars? Not long. Shame on Apple for comparing apples and oranges.
"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"
The Intel Atom has nothing to do with the PPro/P-II/P-III. The Atom is a from scratch(supposedly, but this is intel were taling about), in-order design. The PPro was an out-of-order superscalar design, never meant for the mobile market. The evolution is as follows; PPro -> Pent-II -> Pent-III -> Pentium-M -> Core -> Core 2. Some of the early Core-i series (nehalem), which was supposed to be from the ground up, also benchmarks right at the same level as a Core 2(was in int, or FP?) which makes it really suspicious that the Core-i series is really a "new" design.
Just a little FYI. Now back on topic.
The iPhone 5 is a touchscreen-based smartphone developed by Apple. It is the sixth generation of the iPhone and succeeds the iPhone 4S. the phone is a slimmer, lighter model that introduces a higher-resolution, 4-inch screen to the series with 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. The phone also includes a custom-designed ARMv7 processor called the Apple A6, an update to Apple's mobile operating system known as iOS 6, and support for LTE. http://mastlists.com/
It gets better signal .381 AU away from Earth at best. Wonder how well an iPhone would do at that distance.