Motorola Inc’s Semiconductor Products unit is understood to have scheduled an announcement concerning the availability of the MPC604 PowerPC processor for April. Though it is not officially saying what it will be saying, sources within the company have suggested that the chip made it to first silicon about a month ago and that the briefing will see Motorola and IBM Corp unveil the basic benchmarks for the new chip. Officially, the 604 is expected to begin sampling in the third quarter of this year, with volume shipments planned to begin in the fourth quarter of this year. It is expected to be clocked at 100MHz and will be fabricated in 0.5 micron silicon, as is the new 601. At around the same time that the 604 goes into volume production, the next generation MPC 620 is also set to begin sampling. The latest word from IBM is that performance of the 620 – rumoured to be clocked at 200MHz – should rival that of the Power2 multi-chip RISC processor that currently powers its high-end RS/6000 servers and workstations. Motorola is also in the process of preparing to unveil its embedded PowerPC strategy over the next month or two. Though ’embedded’ normally implies computing power for relatively mundane consumer or industrial equipments, previous briefings given to analysts suggest that Motorola is also looking at more ambitious plans to provide integrated processors for handheld computing, television set-top boxes and the like. The MPC603 low-power processor forms the core that will be used by both Motorola and IBM for their embedded applications.
