info on the power pc by ibm apple motorola begin repost ibm apple motorola ready to unwrap powerpc processor the wraps will come off the powerpc processor this week as motorola corp ibm and apple computer inc detail the results of their yearlong effort this first in a series of powerpc processors will be a bit processor with a bit memory interface much like intel corp s pentium with the capability of performing as many as three instructions per clock cycle according to sources familiar with the chip motorola is expected to release the chip in volume by year end in two configurations running at and mhz with performance of and specint marks respectively sources said floating point performance for the volt processors will be even better as their specfp performance will be and respectively the a scaled down version of the power chip developed by ibm for its rs workstations will also include a k single buffered cache on the chip with protocols to support motorola s bit multiprocessor bus built in the chip which is being designed initially to support the micro channel architecture is bus independent so vendors could develop powerpc based systems using a number of different architectures including isa eisa or sun microsystems inc s s bus design one source noted according to sources familiar with the development effort motorola has been extremely successful in developing the powerpc as an inexpensive architecture despite a complex design made up of more than million transistors using a micron technology initial chips are expected to be priced from to only slightly higher than intel corp s processors but could be sold profitably for less than one source said end repost
