As fevered gossip about multiple revisions to the PowerPC 604 continue to bubble and with the Pentium bug public relations disaster still fresh in most minds, Motorola Inc said last week that Both PowerPC manufacturing companies [Motorola and IBM Corp] are moving forward on a plan to publish the PowerPC errata in the future. Currently, both companies issue errata sheets to their OEM customers on confidential basis. Consequently, even if there were design faults in the chip, neither Motorola nor IBM would tell the world at large about them. To date our sister publication PowerPC News has managed to unearth only one bug in the 604; early iterations of the chip could not handle symmetric multiprocessing correctly, although we’ve been assured that this is now fixed. But another affiliate, ClieNT Server News, reckons that the chip has been through at least 13 iterations all told: three in revision one, three on revision two and seven in revision three of the processor. But it will be quite some time until we know the details. According to Motorola, The errata on the PowerPC 601 will be published first, and then progress to other parts in the family including the 603, 604 and others. It is a complex issue since design, application engineering, legal and all parties concerned at both companies must approve the errata before they can be published. It sounds suspiciously as if the errata will not actually be made public until the particular chip has become obsoleted, and designers have moved on to the next best thing.
