It turns out that IBM Rochester was a major contributor to the design of the 64-bit PowerPC 620 – the Minnesota Application Systems unit had designed a new processor four years ago when like the unfeeling mother whose industrious lad had just succeeded in rigging a beautiful sailing ship in a bottle said yes dear, very nice – now take it out again, there’s sixpence back on that bottle, they were told they’d done a superb job, but the future now lay with PowerPC: with characteristic IBM resignation, they set to to examine the PowerPC and found to their horror that it had no integer arithmetic, no string and array handling, and inadequate error checking and correction, and once they had persuaded the powerPCs that be that these things actually mattered, they were all retrofitted – at least in the version of the 620 that will go into the Advanced System 36 and into future AS/400s.
