1998 lives ... in Perseverance :)

1998, the year of the Technicolor Macs, ran on Power PC hardware, the first prime time use of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) as this was the only viable way to make the Apple fast enough to do high res real world graphics without issue. Now, this ultra reliable chip resides in Perseverance and for good reason ... Mars is hostile to the max.

To whit.

NASA’s brand-new Perseverance rover is the most advanced machine that’s ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. Perseverance is running on none other than a PowerPC 750, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors that’s most famous for powering the original “Bondi blue” iMac from 1998. It’s the same type of processor that NASA already uses in its Curiosity rover.

That may seem like a waste to some. After all, even with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, surely NASA could have found the budget for something like Intel’s $500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max clock speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere in the $2.7 billion cost of Perseverance. But as New Scientist explains, such an advanced chip is actually a detriment to the unique operating conditions of Mars.

Image: Apple

To make the system even more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a little different than the one in the old iMacs. It’s technically a RAD750 chip, a special variant that’s hardened against radiation and costs upwards of $200,000. The chip is popular for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others.

The chip has never failed.