IBM Corp and Motorola Inc yesterday announced the expected PowerPC 603e version of the 603 with the bigger cache, and also the 602, the rather shadowy part that is aimed at applications such as games machines and television set-top boxes. The 100MHz PowerPC 603e is designed for notebook computers, offering high performance and low power consumption and is now expected to be the chip in Apple Computer Inc’s first PowerPC Powerbooks. It offers 16Kb data and 16Kb instruction caches and is made in 0.5 micron CMOS, integrating 2.6m transistors. It is rated at 120 SPECint92 and 105 SPECfp92 at 3W. The 602 is clocked at 66MHz, includes on-chip floating point unit and uses superscalar execution – and, as reported, is the part 3DO Co will use in its M2 Accelerator for the Interactive Multiplayer; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd intends to use the 602 in its 64-bit 3DO systems. It is rated at 132 MFLOPS and an estimated 40 SPECint92; it has 4Kb dataand instruction caches and dissipates 1.2W. Ships in second half from both firms; no prices as yet.
