IBM Corp and Motorola Inc are competitors in the PowerPC-based microcontroller business (to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, IBM insists on calling them embedded controllers) and so IBM yesterday launched PowerPC Embedded Controller 403GA or PPC 403GA, and Motorola reannounced its MPC505 competitor. IBM is aiming the 403GA at office automation, networking equipment and consumer applications: it has a superscalar RISC core and delivers 72K Dhrystones per second at 33MHz while integrating a four-channel DMA controller, DRAM controller, input-output controller, two-way set associative instruction and data caches, serial port, multi-level interrupt controller and multiple timer facilities. The bus interface means little glue logic is needed for memory and peripherals.The 25MHz is $48.91 for 1,000-up with samples now, volume by year-end.
