IBM Microelectronics and Motorola Semiconductor will this week pick up the pieces of their PowerPC campaign and try to put them back into some semblance of order. Their Somerset Design Center is to delineate a four-year road map which describes two further generations of the architecture up to the year 2000 and beyond. There will be more than one chip family within each G3 and G4 generation and processors will be targeted at specific applications. We assume G1 was the first generation PowerPC 601 and G2 accounts for the 604 and 620. Somerset claims it will match Intel Corp for price and performance at every step, although IBM has now shut the lid firmly on the notion it once held of executing iAPX-86 instructions on a PowerPC design, often referred to as 615. Of course the PowerPC alliance was created back in 1991 with the specific purpose of taking on Intel Corp’s dominance. The current PowerPC architectures, 603/e, 604/e and the forthcoming 64-bit 620/e will top out at 300MHz and eight million transistor, 0.25 micron designs by the end of next year. Beginning around the middle of next year the two companies plan to offer systems built around a G3 architecture. G3 architecture includes 32-bit and 64-bit processors, a new bus, cache enhancements and 0.35 to 0.25 micron designs with up to 30 million transistors. Beginning 1999 systems will be offered with chips based upon a new G4 PowerPC microarchitecture, again in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, with up to 50 million transistors going on to 0.25 to 0.18 micron designs. G4 will use a new core. A shadowy Project 2K will house the first post-2000 developments. The companies won’t put processor part numbers to any of the G3 and G4 work. The Apache and merged PowerPC/Power instruction set efforts known respectively as PowerPC 625 and 630 are both IBM projects. Motorola will price its 166MHz, 180MHz and 200MHz 604e this week. Surprisingly – or maybe not if previous form is taken into account – the two companies do not plan to formally announce their plans, despite the obvious need to evangelize their RISC. They just want people to know there is someone behind the wheel.
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