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IBM, Motorola sign on to single PowerPC chip

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the playing-nicely-with-the-other-vendors dept.

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. "

2 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. What about... by sinator · · Score: 3

    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)...

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  2. The article's a little off by webslacker · · Score: 5

    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.