IBM Discloses 64-bit PowerPC Details

SAN JOSE-IBM described its latest 64-bit PowerPC Tuesday morning, a chip that analysts are already speculating will form the engine inside the next Apple Macintosh computer.

On paper, the new PowerPC 970 chip looks quite impressive. IBM has taken its high end Power4 architecture - which, for servers, combines several processor cores on one chip - and reduced it down to a point where it can fit inside a desktop computer. As is the case when a new PowerPC chip is introduced, analysts began speculating as to who may buy it.

"They can't say Apple, but we can, speculatively, of course," said Tom Halfhill, an analyst with MDR/In-Stat, the hosts of the show here.

The PowerPC 970 triples the length of the PowerPC pipeline, which translates into a higher clock speed: 1.4 to 1.8 GHz at the core's introduction, according to Peter Sandon, senior processor architect within the PowerPC organization at IBM Microelectronics.

Perhaps more importantly, the front-side bus can transfer up to 7.2 GBytes per second, roughly four times the bandwidth of the current Pentium 4 front-side bus, according to MDR's Halfhill. Finally, the core uses a single-instruction multiple-data unit (SIMD), which actually uses the same 162 instructions as Motorola's Altivec engine. Due to copyright restrictions, however, IBM can not use the Altivec name.

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