GM Touting Computing Power in 2012 Buick Regal

For all you tech geeks out there, GM has released details of the computational speed of the engine control processor in its upcoming 2012 Buick Regal. If you read the raw specs on the processor (three megabytes of memory and a 128 MHz clock speed) they'd probably only sound impressive in terms of a 1995 Pentium chip. Unlike that early Windows machine, the Regal's Qorivva MPC5566 chip is a 32-bit processor, and being able to reliably perform 125 million operations per second actually makes it an underhood powerhouse in the automotive industry.
Automotive electronics have come a long way in the last 20 years, considering that GM's first processor in the 1980s operated at only 1 MHz (one million operations per second), and used just 4 kilobytes (0.004 megabytes) of memory. This is comparable with what went to the moon on the Apollo mission, as that spacecraft's guidance computer operated at 1.024 MHZ and used 2 kilobytes of memory. Also consider that the Regal's 128MHz chip is plenty quick enough to handle multiple individual combustion events, even with the engine running at its maximum speed of 6,350 rpm.
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