NASA Perseverance rover 200 MHZ CPU costs $200K

Yes.......
They have been tailored for specific purpose.

Mining soil.......and so....

Here on earth......cryptomining...

 

"The RCE withstands temperatures from -55 ° C to +125 ° C. In addition, the processor is not only extremely robust against extreme temperatures, but it also withstands radiation levels that would put conventional systems out of action. To put it into perspective: The RAD750 can withstand radiation of up to 10,000 Gray (Gy for short) - 6 Gy means death for humans."

- Wow. (great article)

 

"A similar system has been running on Curiosity for nearly 10 years"

Yep, and so will my 1080Ti if thing don't change.

 

Your GPU may have collectors value before you'll manage to get new one.

 

I have over 100 RTX 3080 video cards and about 50 CPU mining Monero and Etherum.
Looking to diversify my portfolio with this kind of CPU's.
I think I can short order 10 of them easily .
JK I am so poor I can barely cross the street.

 

It's a good thing running scientific instruments on another planet is a lot easier than running Crysis back here on Earth.

 

Well, people were flying to the moon and back with a CPU that is worse than modern day calculators. It's a bit amazing if you think about it, but definitely all space and even military applications require robustness over speed.

 

So there isn't such a thing like 5GHz all core or velocity boost and stuff up there?

 

yes, totally - which is why we at "such and such" go to none other than... hahaha

If that's what they can get done with just a measly 200MHZ are we wasting our 5GHZ?

 

0.25um = 250nm, sure must be crap

 

So, it can run in crisis, but no Crysis.

 

Seems I have to say the same for the 5700XT

 

hwunboxed : "we still would have recommended nasa used a ryzen"

 

Consider the Space shuttle (Atlantis etc) computing power was less than 1% that of a Xbox 360 CPU.
Until 1991 used 512kb RAM which was upgraded to 1Mb afterwards until their retirement.
Originally back in the 1970s used 32 gauges, four cathode-ray tubes and a variety of electro-mechanical devices.

Even the new Orion capsule is less powerful than a mobile phone. Is using 2 IBM PowerPC 750X single core processor from 2002!!!!
Soyuz until the 2003 upgrade used a 6kb RAM and computer from the 60s!!!!

The computers used for the lunar landings had 4Kb RAM!!!!!

While Voyager 1 & 2 are running today on a CDP1802 CPU, 70Kb RAM and they communicate to earth with 160 bits per second rate from 13 and 11 billion miles away respectively.

It puts everything in perspective.

FYI SpaceX is not cheapening on computing power.
Falcon 9 is using 3 dual cores, dozens of PowerPC microcontrollers.
Crew Dragon several Tegra 2 for the tablets, touch screens. It has a lot of computing power to even play CP2077.

 

All fine and dandy, but the crucial, most important thing is reliability.
Maybe the CPU is made on that specific node just to give the circuitry more density on trace paths for redundancy and transmission.
New technology is a "convoluted mess" older technology can be refined and honed to perfection, thus achieving reliability.
Convoluted mess - on a tech channel (sorry, I am still looking for it ) an tech engineer confessed that even that everything is well though and designed, there are shortcuts, workarounds and trade secrets. Sh!t works, but don't send that in space, it has a huge probability of failure.

So, NASA wanted the most boring and trustworthy, reliable CPU out there.

Maybe I am wrong and talking crap. Maybe not.
What say you?

 

I'm just glad they finally found that decades old technology they "lost" when they landed on the moon.

 

Also, that process is so huge they could have just used Legos.

 

Yeah you're right on. They're paying for redundancy, low usage, and reliability. It's just like car embedded systems. They use chips that are slow, "dual core" (but they actually just do the same thing and compare computation), etc. I'm sure if they popped out 100k of those chips, it would be way cheaper. They just don't need 100k of them.

It's like comparing a desktop pc to a server. Way more expensive to buy a server but they're designed to run 24/7 for a long time with no problems.

 

NASA = decades-long budgetary constraints; SpaceX does not.