It seems that Santa Clara, California-based Quantum Effect Design Inc, the MIPS design house trying to turn itself into a fabless microprocessor vendor, has been working for the past two years on the 603q, a mid-range PowerPC chip with performance similar to the 603 but at half the power and two-thirds the die size. It was aimed at the low-end desktop market and embedded systems. According to the Microprocessor Report, QED’s unnamed customer – which it seems to suggest was Motorola Inc for Apple Computer Inc – apparently pulled the plug on the project a few weeks after it taped out, leaving QED with a completed design and no customer. QED doesn’t have a PowerPC license of its own, and can only sell to a licenced fabricator, which is a somewhat limited field.
