Tuesday, 15 October 2002
The PowerPC 970 is happening, due in Macs by this time next year. After seeing the initial announcement, Tuesday I spent some time going through IBM's history of making RISC chips from 1990 onwards. Until the two lines were integrated with the POWER4, the high-end chips were split along lines of commercial (AS/400 or iSeries, some RS/6000 or pSeries) versus technical (RS6K/pSeries) workloads.
I've posted this a couple of other places, sorry if you've seen it before. To complete the timeline of IBM RISC chips:
1990 – POWER (32-bit POWER, multichip)
1992 – POWER (32-bit POWER)
1993 – PowerPC 601, 602? (modified 32-bit PowerPC)
1994-5? – A30/Muskie (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, multichip)
1994 – A10/Cobra (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC)
1995 – POWER2 (32-bit POWER, multichip)
1995 – PowerPC 603, 604 (32-bit PowerPC)
1996 – PowerPC 603e/604e (32-bit PowerPC)
1996 – POWER2 SC (32-bit POWER)
1997 – RS64 (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
1998 – PowerPC 750 (32-bit PowerPC)
1998 – RS64-II (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
1999 – POWER3 (64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
1999 – RS64-III (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
2000 – POWER3-II (64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
2000 – RS64-IV (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
2001 – POWER4 (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)
2002 – POWER4-II [expected]
2003 – PowerPC 970 (64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC, AltiVec)
Wes pointed to an interesting article about the PowerPC's use in AS/400 and iSeries machines. There's some good history (more AIX-centric) here, and some more on the early AS/400 RISC processors here.
8:37 PM
