The Perseverance vehicle that NASA placed on Mars uses the same processor used in the iMac 23 years ago.
As NewScientist reports, the vehicle includes the PowerPC 750 processor, the same chip used in the iMac G3 in 1998.
Although the chipset is the same, there are differences between the version of the processor that was plugged into Apple's consumer computer and the one that powers the spacecraft's functions.
The Perseverance processor is built to withstand temperatures between -55 and 125 degrees Celsius and is priced at an estimated $ 200.000.
The PowerPC 750 processor was ahead of its time when it was released, with a single core, a 233 MHz processor, 6 million transistors (although if you compare that with the 16.000 million transistors they have today ...) and an architecture of 32 bit.
Apple used PowerPC chips in Macs until it switched to Intel in 2005. Right now, Apple is undergoing a similar change, abandoning Intel to use its own Apple M1 cards in Macs.
