Exponential Technology Inc, the San Jose company developing a 500MHz version of the PowerPC, has been utterly silent on the development for the past year, but is finally ready to show its hand, MacWeek reports. The paper expects Exponential to describe the 500MHz X704 BiCMOS version of the PowerPC on October 22 at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, preparatory to shipping the things early next year. Apple Computer Inc was known to be interested and Mac cloners DayStar Digital Inc, of Flowery Branch, Georgia, Power Computing Corp of Round Rock, Texas; and Umax Computer Corp of Fremont, California are all said to be working with Exponential to design 500MHz systems. In addition to funding Exponential, Apple has loaned engineers to work on the project and is rewriting the Mac ROMs to run at high speed. The company finally received a PowerPC license from IBM Corp in February. Use of BiCMOS has meant that Exponential has had to develop a patented cooling system to prevent overheating . It will have a small bipolar Level 1 cache on the chip, and a much bigger second level CMOS cache off chip, but while compute-intensive tasks will benefit enormously from the new chip, performance on applications with a lot of input-output activit y will be severely constrained by the speed of the bus.
