IBM, Motorola sign on to single PowerPC chip

Toddius Maximus writes "The on-again off-again partnership between IBM and Motorola to design a single PowerPC architecture appears to be on again. The companies made a joint announcement Wednesday that they will work together on an embedded version of the PowerPC that will be targeted at networking and telecommunications devices.Story here. "

Comments

Enh

[cpt kangarooski]

The announcement is about an embedded chip. That's nice but I'm more interested in the larger processors... G4 and such. Honestly I side with IBM, in that faster chips are better (that is in that it will speed up all operations w/o rewriting anything & makes for better marketing) than additional instructions. 'Course, I'd rather have both - I won't deny that Altivec is cool, I just think that higher clock speeds would be better overall.

What about...

[sinator]

This partnership seems nice on the exterior, but what about Motorola's Coldfire line of 68xxx processors for embedded work? That's a big money maker, especially in *Motorola* cellular phones and other embedded processors. I can see the motivation perhaps in the realm of interoperability with Bigger Computers (tm) but AFAIK the Coldfire runs on a lot less power than the PowerPC for comparable performance (remember, these are embedded apps)...

The article's a little off

[webslacker]

It doesn't mention the new architecture's name or main purpose.

The architecture's name is Book E, and it was designed to allow IBM and Motorola to make their own customizations and still stay compatible. Embedded processors were the main drive for Book E, but it's also useful to the PowerPC processors for use in PowerMacs. However, the effects of Book E will not be felt to Mac users until after the G4 processors have collected a little dust.

Look for more Baby ATs

[ripcrd]

You get this group to start making those PC's on a chip, maybe buy out Cyrix or IDT and you got yourself the next wave of small computers. Or they could make a deal with some motherboard mfg. to use their PC on a chip (CPU, chipset, etc.) on mobo w/sound, video, SCSI, 56K or cable modem built in and we're talkin' cutting edge, small footprint computing. I for one would like to clear some crap off my desk (work and home). They could add an AGP slot for upgrading video and totally drop the ISA slot. Maybe two or three PCI and an AGP. And make it a sub $250 system. Wishful thinking.