[X] My Assistant

[nprev]

A member requested a thread dedicated to this topic, so here it is. Please review recently-added rule 1.4 & keep it in mind (as well as the rest of them). Enjoy!

[Brian Swift]

Technically it's still part of Perseverance...

There was discussion today during the Ingenuity preview press conference that the helicopter's CPU was 100s of times faster than all previous planetary mission flight computers combined. Someone also mentioned/thanked Qualcom as a partner.

Internet search says Ingenuity CPU is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801.
Specs at https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon-processors-801

I started to wonder if that chip's Wi-Fi/Bluetooth would be used to communicated with Perseverance, but wikipedia say comm is via 900 MHz Zigbee.

[JRehling]

Hundreds of times faster is an eye-catching claim. It seems that Ingenuity's CPU's clock speed is about 14x that of the Curiosity rover, which is a considerable difference, and it has four cores, and apparently twice the bus width of the former, and 14 * 4 * 2 is indeed over 100. It's not straightforward to compare computing power in objective units, but it seems like the claim is at least approximate if not literal.

Moore's "law," holding that CPU speeds increase exponentially over time more or less held true from the 1950s through 2010. Spacecraft computers tend to be about 10 years older than the launch date, so here we are ~10 years after Moore's law ran out of steam. This might make Perseverance part of the last generation of spacecraft with computational power much greater than its predecessors. N.B., virtually every part of what I just said merits at least one grain of salt.

[mcaplinger]

It's not straightforward to compare computing power in objective units...

Indeed. "Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks", to paraphrase Twain.

Who cares how fast anything is if it's fast enough to do what it needs to do? All the MSSS embedded processors on Mars are 40 MHz IPC=1 RISCS with 128Kbytes of SRAM.