Based on a paper the PowerPC people delivered at IEEE’s CompCon get-together in San Francisco two weeks ago, Electronic Engineering Times is saying the 601 chip sampling now is a lot more powerful than when it was first described. IBM Corp is also positioning PowerPC against Intel Corp’s Pentium, saying it will offer the same performance at a much lower cost. Significantly, the 601 will be usable in symmetric multiprocessing file servers. It incorporates new instructions, more pipelining than expected, support for single-precision arithmetic and a new cache structure. Meanwhile the high-end 620 chip, for moderately to massively parallel servers, is said to be being set for 64 bits with a special environment mode bit that can switch between 32- and 64-bit operation.
