IBM releases more 970 details


A Macworld UK report quotes details of a just-released internal IBM report that adds flesh to rumors about that company's much-anticipated PPC 970. Specifically, the information now available was culled from limited circulation excerpts from the 2002 Microprocessor Review.

The report's author, Tom Halfhill, wrote "Nobody at IBM would confirm rumours that a leading customer for the PowerPC 970 is Apple - and Apple is even more tight-lipped. Nevertheless, the 970 is such an obvious improvement over today's Motorola G4 family PowerPC chips that it's hard to imagine Apple using anything else in its desktop Macs and servers."

Tasty tidbit quoted by Macworld UK in the report include:

o The chip has been "tailor-made" for professional publishing and media-processing applications;
o The PPC 970 has 64-bit datapaths and memory addressing, yet it's natively compatible with 32-bit PowerPC software;
o Bus rates of 900MHz, 6.4GB/s (2 x 3.2GB/s) data bandwidth, AltiVec;
o 64K L1 cache with a 512K L2 cache;

Here are several of the jucier quotes from Halfhill:
o "The deeper pipeline is especially welcome because it could allow the 970 to reduce the growing clock-frequency gap between today's PowerPC chips and the speedy x86 competition;"
o Moto's G4 and G4+ are referred to as "stunted;"
o "The PowerPC 970 is clearly in a different class than existing G4+, G4 and G3 PowerPC chips. Its deeper pipelines and much faster FSB fix the most serious shortcomings of today's PowerPCs."

Finé

Editor's note: One might assume that IBM released these details to refute some of the more pointed and incorrect rumors surrounding the PPC 970. It's interesting to note that this report all but confirms that the 970 will indeed be used in upcoming PowerMacs.

In yesterday's PPC 970 rumor report, IGM repeated a claim that the FSB speed would allow for throughput of up to 7.2GBps. This speculation has now been refuted.

However, other information listed yesterday - cache, Altivec, etc - appear to be born out by this latest trickle of information.