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by dylan604 883 days ago
> If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu

If you're remembering correctly, then I'm misremembering in that this has essentially a Snapdragon chip and not a rad hardened CPU at all

2 comments

They used the hardened PowerPC for the rover, similar to previous mars rovers and the Snapdragon chip for the helicopter.
Maybe I am misremembering the interview. Maybe the person said that they used to use a hardened IBM power chip?
This information is pretty widely available, e.g. on Wikipedia [1], no need to go off memory. Flight control is done by an FPGA, the main CPU is a Snapdragon 801 running Linux, and it uses Zigbee to communicate with the rover.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Avionic...

At least they won't have any trouble finding a free channel.