By Dan Jones
IBM Corp and Motorola Inc have given their PowerPC design the hefty kick it needs to remain a contender in the embedded marketplace, unveiling a true 64-bit architecture and other design enhancements. The companies have dubbed the upgraded architecture E Book, and claim the enhancements will make the component especially suitable for wired and wireless communications, networking, information appliances and real time applications.
The E Book chip will run true 64-bit code and is backwards compatible with 32-bit code. A spokesperson for IBM said that changes have been made to timers, debug and interrupt functions on the chip, to make it more suitable for real time applications. Floating point performance has been accelerated with IBM’s Integer multiply-accumulate (MAC) Unit. The chip will also include Motorola’s Altivec multimedia extensions, and boats a 4Gb address space.
The embedded PowerPC chip has been losing ground against rival designs from ARM Holdings Plc and MIPS Technologies Inc over the last two years. The 32-bit design had seen strong growth since its launch in 1993, but that growth slowed last year, when only 5 million PowerPC chips compared to sales of approximately 50 million units for both MIPS and. Joe D’Elia, semiconductor analyst at Dataquest, said the move to a enhanced design was crucial for survival of the embedded PowerPC. Motorola and IBM had to do something if they wanted PowerPC to remain a cohesive force, he commented.
The move to a true 64-bit architecture may be regarded as somewhat premature in an industry where 16-bit chips are still common place. ARM insists that it will stick with 32-bit designs, claiming that there is no customer demand for 64-bit designs. The IBM spokesperson also admitted that there was unlikely to be a rush of customers for the chip on its initial release. However, he said, refer back to 1993 when we introduced the 32-bit design, people said, ‘well why are you doing this? Nobody wants it.’ There are no firm details on when the E Book design will be available but it is likely to be next year.
