IBM today announced it has reached a major milestone in the shipment
of its one-millionth copper PowerPC™
chip, just one year after shipping the first copper chip.
IBM's copper PowerPC processors are helping to fuel the company's
growth as a major OEM supplier to makers of networking gear. The
company also announced the industry's highest-performance embedded
processor to date, the copper-based PowerPC 440,
which can be used to boost the flow of traffic in the routers, hubs,
and switches that power networks like the Internet.
"We're bringing our best technologies to bear in chips for networking,"
said Chris King, Vice President of Wired Communications for IBM
Microelectronics. "Many companies that make networking equipment
depend on custom chips to differentiate their products. With today's
announcement, we can help them maintain their competitive edge."
The PowerPC 440 is the newest addition to IBM's rapidly growing
Blue Logic library of chip "cores" — pieces of chip design that
can be combined quickly to create new chips for a wide range of
markets including communications, servers, storage systems, and
pervasive computing devices. The new core, based on IBM's leadership
copper technology, provides about three times the performance of
the PowerPC 405 core introduced by the company just last year. It
is well suited for a variety of applications — including printers,
RAID controllers, cellular base stations, and set-top boxes, among
others.
The tiny, four-square-millimeter PowerPC 440 operates at speeds
of 550 MHz and at typical performance levels of up to 1000 MIPS
(millions of instructions per second), thanks in part to IBM's advanced
0.18-micron copper technology. The PowerPC 440 processor provides
an easy upgrade to chip designs based on IBM's existing PowerPC
401and 405 processors. The new core is the first to be compliant
with the new "Book E" enhancements to the PowerPC architecture,
co-defined by IBM. Beyond its use in custom designs, IBM expects
to develop a variety of standard chips based on the PowerPC 440.
To support the performance of the PowerPC 440, IBM also introduced
a 128 bit CoreConnect™ bus,
upgrading the 64-bit, no-cost, on-chip bus architecture the company
introduced earlier this year. Designed as a high-speed pipeline
for passing information to the processor, CoreConnect also provides
a standard method for quickly connecting pieces of chip designs
from various suppliers. This serves as an open, "system-on-a-chip"
design process that encourages the development of reusable intellectual
property and faster, easier development of new custom chip designs.
Six new companies have licensed the CoreConnect Bus. These licensees
are leading IP and service providers. The list of licensees now
includes: Analog Devices, Inc.; Cadence Design Systems, Inc.; CAE
Plus, Inc.; Carnegie Mellon University; Enabling Technologies; Innovative
Semiconductors, Inc.; Intrinsix Corporation; Kyushu University;
Lexra, Inc.; Mentor Graphics Corporation; Prophet Systems; Stellar
Semiconductor Inc.; Summit Design, Inc.; and Technical Data Freeway,
Inc.
While the PowerPC architecture may be best-known for chips for
Apple Computer systems, what may not be as well known is that the
PowerPC has found broader penetration in a variety of applications
in speeds ranging from 300 to 500 MHz. IBM customers have integrated
the PowerPC in printer controllers, storage devices, communications
devices, and other applications beyond traditional computing systems.
Similarly, IBM was the first to introduce copper technology into
volume production and has since incorporated copper into standalone
PowerPC processors for Apple, as well as its own RS/6000 servers.
Copper technology is also integral to IBM's S/390 G6 server, as
well as a host of custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit)
and stand-alone embedded processor designs.
Additional technical details on the PowerPC 440 will be disclosed
in a presentation at Microprocessor Forum on October 6th.