IBM showcases new PowerPC chips |
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Sun, 10 Jul 2005 04:05
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TOKYO: International Business Machines is introducing two new PowerPC chips meant for entry-level servers and PCs. The Big Blue said its PowerPC 970MP will be a dual-core version of its existing PowerPC 970FX, used mostly in Macs. There will be a low-power version too.
What is unique about the chip is that each of its two 64-bit cores has dedicated 1MB of level-two cache memory, by which one of the sides of the chip can be powered down to a "doze" state while the other core will continue to do the processing. There is tremendous power saving with this design, said IBM. The chip will have speeds from 1.4GHz to 2.5GHz.
The company said the chip consumes between 13W and 16W at frequencies of 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. While this could be more than the 10W power consumed by the Freescale MPC7448 used in 1.5Ghz PowerBooks, it is just half of what Intel's Pentium M consumes when used in laptops.
The low-power version with speeds up to 2.7GHz is for printers and digital video recorders.
Apple Computer, which had been the primary customer for PowerPC chips for use in its Macs, had a month ago ended its arrangement with IBM, switching over to Intel. Apple did not comment on the new development.
IBM had reiterated earlier that it is going to promote its Power architecture technology in a big way as an alternative to the x86-based architecture of Intel and AMD. The new processors, said IBM, will be available in clusters of servers such as its Blue Gene/L super computer, in high-performance storage devices, single-board computers and networking products.
The company is also eyeing the open source community. It has launched its OpenPower Project, an online forum Linux community to access tools and reference material from IBM. Developers who sign up can test their software using IBM's Power5-based OpenPower servers.
IBM and Apple had to part ways because of the manufacturing problems that delayed shipments of the G5 chips last year and the power-consumption issues.
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