This month’s Byte magazine carries a comparison of how the PowerPC RISC stacks up against Intel Corp’s Pentium – given the lower cost of the 601, IBM Corp believes that PowerPC has an extremely good price-performance advantage:
66MHz Pentium 601 Borland C Microsoft C
Numeric sort 1 1.5 1.5 Bit-field ops 1 4.7 2.8 Emulated float 1 1.8 3.2 Simple FPU ops 1 1.9 1.5 Transcendental FPU ops 1 0.7* 0.7* Power needed 16W 9W 9W Volume purchase $965 $450** $450**
* Due to the preliminary form of the floating point library used.** Based on purchase of 1,000 chips.
