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: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 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.