There are no details on this one yet, but James Thomas, IBM Corp’s director of RISC Microprocessor development, says we can expect a version of the PowerPC 604 with a smaller die-size. Showing a picture of the 604 to an audience of industry luminaries at Dataquest’s European Semiconductor Industry Conference the other day, he described the 604 as a little bit chubby, for time-to-market reasons and added but you should expect to see that [die size] come down. Our best guess is that IBM is working on a version of the 604 that uses its new 0.5 micron transistor geometry, the technology that was used to shrink the 601 from 120mm square to 74mm square and cut its power consumption from 8 Watts to 4 Watts, despite the increased clock speed.
