Despite being the one second source Digital Equipment Corp has managed to line up for its Alpha RISC, Mitsubishi Electric Corp is apparently of the mind that you can’t have too many different RISCs on your books, and has formally signed up to market IBM Corp’s embedded versions of the PowerPC under its own name. Way back last summer, the company indicated an interest in the PowerPC when word surfaced that it was definitely planning a Personal Digital Assistant and that the thing might use the PowerPC (CI No 2,588) – and such an application would definitely need an embedded version. IBM hopes the pact will lead to greater use of the parts in multimedia, office, and Internet products. Mitsubishi is licensing the RISC core and the library of application-specific circuitry that has so far been developed, and is allowed to add customized functions of its own to the chips – although it is apparently not entitled to fabricate them – it has to go back to IBM for that. The agreement covers the PowerPC 401GF, PowerPC 403, and the PowerPC 602 chip designed for use in games players.
