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

Not for high end Macs

[adzoox]

The PPC 970 (& later 980) are all but confirmed and shipping according to several sites (non rumor sites too). The most vocal being MacBiduolle. They had a Quicksilver prototype 2 months before it's appearance and have been on the money for most things. There are CONFIRMED machines in Adobe running 970s too.

Apple will most likely use this as an oppurtunity to drop the G3. Finally Apple will have Altivec across the board. You have to take into account that the manufacturing process also reduces heat and well ... size ... making this sound more and more like a processor for an iBook.

I also beleive Apple will use this as an oppurtunity to make everything above 1Ghz this year. We will most also likely see quad G4 Xserves because of this (moto producing better G4s)

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!

Apple shouldn't move to x86 as suggested in the redundant Apple naysayers. (hey you "apple is dead people": how about looking in my journal?) I rather like the RISC processor anf the PPC - there is MUCH less code overhead and easier "addon" capability (cache, media functionality, i/o) - Motorola has been the hold up in it's development and needed someone like IBM to step in and lend a hand, they have done so.

Still Too Little, Too Late Anyway

[mgbastard]

This is actually bad news. The MPC7457 still doesn't make full use of the bandwidth available in the DDR400 RAM the Macs are currently using. The MPC7470 does, but we're still not getting that chip - for whatever reason - I assume its a manufacturing & design issue. It's been a very long delay.

Motorola looks pretty amateurish with this feeble boost. This is a manufacturing tweak that intel and IBM have made months ago in their primary foundries. The MPC7457 likely isn't going to get used in any serious Macintoshes - perhaps it will go into the iBook and iMacs eventually.

So perhaps Motorola has given up on the MPC7470, and conceded that market to IBM's 970 and 980 chips. Let's hope so; I would like to buy a new workstation pretty soon. ;-)