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Mars has a new inhabitant: the Snapdragon.
The common Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which powers most Android smartphones in the US, runs inside Ingenuity, an autonomous drone now on Mars, Qualcomm says. It arrived on the Red Planet yesterday via the Perseverance rover (which uses a processor similar to those you would find in early iMacs), and it will be our first attempt to fly anything in the atmosphere of Mars.
Snapdragon takes flight on the red planet
Peserverance’s Ingenuity helicopter is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor using the Snapdragon Flight platform. The ingenuity is not part of the main mission of the rover: It is a proof of concept to show that you can fly on Mars, with five test flights scheduled for next month.
The Snapdragon Flight platform, announced in 2015, has a 2.26GHz CPU and can capture 4K video. The 4-pound helicopter needs to be more powerful than the rover itself because it is autonomously figuring out how to navigate complex conditions in real time. The ingenuity will have to figure out how to stay warm, make sure it’s loaded, check its blades and motors, and then fly and land, all without direct human involvement. The flights will soar about 16 feet in the air and last up to 90 seconds, according to NASA.
The helicopter has a 0.5-megapixel downward-facing navigation camera and a 13-megapixel front-facing camera to help you figure out what’s going on around you. Its “telephone” component operates on the 900 MHz frequency, similar to many wireless landlines, and transmits data at a speed of up to 250 kbps over a distance of approximately half a mile back to the mobile.
4 phones that ran the Snapdragon 801
The Snapdragon 801 chipset was quite popular in popular smartphones of that time. Here are four that have the same power on board as a helicopter on Mars:
One plus one
In 2015, we said “with an unbeatable price and power to spare, the OnePlus One is an Android reveal that defies expectations for affordable smartphones.”
Samsung Galaxy S5
In 2014, I said that “the Samsung Galaxy S5 is the fastest and most functional smartphone available today. It has the best screen, the best Wi-Fi performance and the best camera for an Android phone.”
LG G3
In 2014, we said that “the LG G3 somehow packs a world-beating display and a massive battery in a premium, slim case, making it the most advanced phone on the market.
HTC One M8
In 2014, we said that “applications are released urgently, high-end games play smoothly, and full desktop websites are easy to process. Everything about using One is very seamless.”
Perseverance: the power of an older iMac
Perseverance itself is built on a much older chipset, according to this NASA paper. That’s because the rover is very similar to the previous Curiosity rover. The radiation-enhanced Bae Rad750 computer has 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage, and runs on a 200MHz PowerPC 750-compatible processor. That gives it about the power of an original 1998 iMac, or if you prefer, of the 1998 “Wallstreet” Powerbook G3 models. (We also reviewed that iMac. See what we said at the time below.)
Of course, there are far more powerful cameras and sensors on board the Perseverance than those that were attached to a typical vintage iMac, including a 20-megapixel navigation camera and multiple long-range radios.
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