East Fishkill, NY — (press release excerpt) — IBM announced a newly-developed, high-performance PowerPC microprocessor for use in a variety of applications, including desktops, workstations, servers, and communications products. The new chip, called the IBM PowerPC 970, is derived from IBM's high performance POWER4 server processor.

As the first in a new family of high-end PowerPC processors, the PowerPC 970 is designed for initial speeds of up to 1.8 gigahertz, manipulating data in larger, 64-bit chunks and accelerating compute-intensive workloads like multimedia and graphics through specialized circuitry known as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) unit.

IBM plans to pack performance and new features into the chip using ultra-thin 0.13-micron circuitry (nearly 800 times thinner than a human hair), constructed of copper wiring and about 52 million transistors based on IBM's efficient silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. Additional details on the PowerPC 970 are to be disclosed by IBM this week in a paper presented at Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, CA.

While supporting 64-bit computing for emerging applications, the PowerPC 970 also provides native support for traditional 32-bit applications, which can help preserve users' and developers' software investments. The design also supports symmetric multi-processing (SMP), allowing systems to be created that link multiple processors to work in tandem for additional processing power.

IBM plans to make the PowerPC 970 chip available next year.

 
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