In what was an obviously planned move by both Apple and Motorola Inc., the microprocessor maker officially unveiled its PowerPC 7400 successor, the MPC7450 PowerPC microprocessor Tuesday, shipping at speeds of 533, 667 and 733MHz. The chip is being used in Apple’s new line of Power Mac G4 products.
The RISC chip, also known as the G4-plus, uses the full 128-bit implementation of Motorola’s AltiVec technology. According to a company press release, the new chip incorporates an L2 cache integrated onto the die for greater speeds, and supports a large backside L3 cache with a 64-bit datapath.
The new chip is not being used in the entry-level G4 466MHz Power Mac or the 533MHz models introduced Tuesday, but instead these models are using the slower PowerPC 7410 microprocessor which was also introduced Tuesday at faster speeds, an Apple engineer told MacCentral Tuesday.
MacCentral sources have confirmed the announcement was deliberately planned to coincide with the Apple announcement and that Apple specifically asked Motorola to hold off on the product announcement a number of months ago, including leaking to industry experts and product designers its sustained speeds at a recent microprocessor conference.
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