Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs

Anonymous Cow writes "From The Register: 'Speculation that Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple may be premature. The chip maker yesterday said it had successfully implemented low-k dielectric materials in its 0.18 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, bringing an estimated 20 per cent speed bump to the PowerPC line. Motorola expects to roll out the process on its 0.13 micron chips this month...'"

Comments

Still Playing Catch-Up

[peatbakke]

Low-k? Welcome to the ballgame. IBM rolled out low-k, SOI, and Cu three years ago ... on 0.13 micron. See here and here. So did Intel.

Re:Beyond 1 GHz..?

[The Original Yama]

Read the rest of the article:

Interestingly, Motorola said it had been delivering low-k dielectric 0.18 micron SOI processors for a full quarter. The 7455 is just such a chip - Motorola's claim may explain why Apple has had such success overclocking the 1GHz 0.18 micron MPC7455 to 1.42GHz in its Power Mac models.

Re:Why dont they release it on X86?

[Trurl's Machine]

Its just the OS I want, I'll buy my own monitor etc.

It's the "monitor etc." that Apple wants to sell, not "just the OS".

Motorola does supply other companies

[John_McKee]

Just because Motorola has developed a faster PowerPC, it does not automatically mean that Apple will be using it. PowerPCs are used in other systems, particuarly embedded applications where a majority of PPCs end up.

Re:Not for high end Macs

[Wiz]

The 970 is a great chip. It's benchmarks at the Microprocessor Forum VERY HANDILY beat EVERY processor put up against it - even the AMD 64 bit!

Sorry, that is just rubbish. The 970 is not the best processor ever evented. Check out this link:

970 news at Ace's

It's SPEC figures are good. But they are below the P4 and Opteron which you can easily go out and buy right now of course.

It is also a lot lower the real big machine like the Alpha, Itanium 2 and IBM's own Power4. I think IBM would be very silly if they produced a desktop processor that was a lot faster than their top end server processor!

Re:Not for high end Macs

[Dixie_Flatline]

Actually, the PPC970 is quite a bit faster than the Power4 by design. The PPC970 is faster, but they traded the speed for decreased reliability. The Power4 is meant for true enterprise applications, so IBM made sure that the chip has decent performance, but basically never fails.

Re:Somebody didn't RTFA...970 isn't high-end.

[iJed]

1. The PowerBook is Apple's high-end laptop
2. The PowerMac will almost certainly get this chip long before a PowerBook ever does. Apple has never had a new chip in a laptop first.
3. People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use. It will take the second revision with a smaller process to make a laptop version.
4. Some rumors sites claim to have information on a motherboard for the 970. This motherboard is either for a PowerMac, an Xserver or the mythical Xstation.

Re:Not for high end Macs

[nosferatu-man]

Well, you're half right. The POWER4 is designed for reliability. However, at 1.7ghz, it handily outperforms the projected numbers for a 970, particularly and unsurprisingly in floating point performance.

SPEC2000
POWER4 @ 1.7ghz: 1113/1699 (int/fp)
PPC970 @ 1.8ghz: 937/1085 (int/fp) *projected

Don't get me wrong: as soon as a Mac with this baby in it is available, I'm upgrading, but let's call a spade a spade. The 970 looks to be decently faster than what we currently have in raw processing power, but with a radical, "holy cow where're my pants" faster memory interface.

'jfb

Motorola sells lots of PowerPCs

[Erich]

And apple is not the big customer.

The big customer is everyone who's buying PowerQuicc's and putting them in embedded spaces. PowerQuicc's with RapidIO connections, PowerQuicc's four-on-a-board, lots and lots of PowerPC chips going in lots and lots of embedded spaces.

I was recently at the Global Signal Processing Expo and it was amazing how many people were doing tasks involving heavy signal processing -- where you would expect DSPs and FPGAs -- on PowerPC chips. The interesting thing was that raw number-crunching power wasn't always the most important thing -- many times it is bandwith (what kind of interconnect you have to your processor makes a huge difference when you are trying to process gigabytes of information a second). Sometimes it is programmability that is the reason (use of familiar tools is a big plus). Sometimes you just want to use the same chip to do your signal processing as your network I/O.

Companies like Sky Computers are selling more PowerPCs than companies like Apple Computers.