IBM Corp will describe the next version of its AS/400 PowerPC AS chip at the International Solid-State Circuits conference in San Francisco later this week. IBM says the part now supports multi- threading of instructions across two streams, increasing performance by 30% with less than a 10% increase in chip size. The part is commonly referred to as Northstar and is due in the summer to replace the current Apache chip at the high end of the AS/400 line. There’s some debate whether Northstar will end up in RS/6000s (like Apache) and maybe a single chip implementation of the AS/400 Muskie chipset (CI No 3,232).
