IBM is planning on blowing past Motorola with faster PowerPC chips, reports News.com. In an article entitled IBM pushes to 2GHz with PowerPC chips, John G. Spooner reports that the company — one third of the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance — will have 1GHz chips ready by the end of the year, with 2GHz chips to follow late in 2002.
Although Apple is the one of the higher profile consumers of PowerPC microprocessors — the chips serve as the central processing unit of all Macs — IBM and Motorola’s key markets for the technology are networking equipment and embedded computing devices like TV set-top boxes, said Spooner.
Spooner and the people he interviewed for the article recognize that clock speed isn’t everything, especially for the specialized markets that IBM and Motorola serve with PowerPC technology. Sometimes features like low power consumption and data transfer bandwidth are more important.
The megahertz gap is hotly debated in many circles, since it gives the appearance that Motorola and IBM’s processors work slower than their Intel counterparts. And these efforts, said Spooner, along with similar efforts being made by Motorola, will help to reduce that problem.
Don’t expect Intel to slow down, however. Spooner reports that the chipmaker plans to have its own 2 GHz chips available later this year.
More details can be read on News.com.