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PowerPC Goes 64 bit

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone's-doing-it dept.

prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech runs a story about IBM planning to introduce a new 64-bit PowerPC architecture for desktops in October at the Microprocessor Forum. The conference agenda tells us that "this processor is an 8-way superscalar design that fully supports Symmetric MultiProcessing. The processor is further enhanced by a vector processing unit implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions and implements a system interface capable of up to 6.4GB/s"." There's also a News.com story.

2 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. The PowerPC 620 lives! by perlow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in 1993-1994 when IBM was still working on the OS/2 for PowerPC and WorkPlace OS, and Taligent and "Pink" were still on the drawing board, IBM was planning to release the PowerPC 620 Series, a 64-bit version of the PowerPC 604. They intended to use it to run a 64-bit version of OS/2 that ran on the Mach kernel.

    The design was scrapped because back then the manufacturing process was way too expensive to be cost effective in mass producing the chip. And we all know what happened to PowerPC OS/2.

    http://www.byte.com/art/9411/sec8/art5.htm

  2. PPC? It was 64-bit since inception. by romanval · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The original specs for POWER/PowerPC CPU's were 64/32 bit anyways. This was set in stone over 10 years ago.

    The great thing is that PPC-64 is that it's natively code compatible with PPC-32. No ISA 'extentions' (like x86-64), or instruction convertion (like Itanium), just a simple processor mode switch.

    Apple would be a fool not to jump on this CPU for their high-end workstations or low cost servers.