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To: Mr. Happy who wrote (9386)	11/13/1997 12:18:00 PM
From: Paul Dieterich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

Is IBM already planning on 0.2 PowerPC production? 1-GHz PowerPC, 450-MHz Pentium II to headline conference By Andy Santoni InfoWorld Electric Posted at 5:02 PM PT, Nov 11, 1997 While Intel will tout a 450-MHz version of the Pentium II, IBM will describe a 1-GHz PowerPC processor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco Feb. 5 through 7. Engineers from Intel's Hillsboro, Ore., facility will describe a "third-implementation P6 microprocessor [that] has 7.5 million transistors in a 131 square millimeter die in a 0.25-micrometer [micron] process, and achieves 450 MHz." The P6 generation includes the Pentium Pro processor and the Pentium II, both built with 0.35-micron technology. The next iteration of the architecture, the 0.25-micron Pentium II, code-named Deschutes, is expected in March or April of next year. "Circuits operate between 1.4 V and 2.2 V to provide enhanced support for both mobile and servers," according to the ISSCC Advance Program. "A 3.6 GBps back-side bus supports two L2 [Level 2] cache types, with up to 2 MB on separate cache chips." Committing to a paper at ISSCC is no guarantee Intel will not disclose even higher performance than it promises in this paper's title. Before the 1997 ISSCC, Intel planned to present a paper on a "300-MHz CMOS Microprocessor with Multi-Media Technology." By the time the paper was presented, Intel had chips running at more than 450 MHz. At the 1998 session, Advanced Micro Devices will describe a 0.25-micron version of its K6 processor that promises "performance increases up to 10 percent due to micro-architectural improvements." "Floating-point instructions enhance graphics performance," according to the conference preview. The processor runs from a 100-MHz version of the Socket 7 bus, the preview noted. On the PowerPC side, IBM Austin Research Laboratory will describe a single-issue PowerPC processor that runs as fast as 1.1 GHz at 25 degrees Celsius. The simple-integer processor implements a subset of the PowerPC instruction set. IBM's Burlington, Vt., laboratory will describe a full-feature PowerPC chip that uses the company's copper interconnect technology and 0.2-micron production process to achieve 480 MHz at 85 C and more than 500 MHz at room temperature. The dual-issue PowerPC 750 processor uses copper for six layers of interconnect wiring. An IBM laboratory in Rochester, Minn., will provide a paper on a commercial multithreaded version of the PowerPC chip. "Instruction stream multi-threading improves execution time by helping hide the latency of memory accesses," according to the paper's preview. Digital Semiconductor will describe a 600-MHz Alpha processor and a 200-MHz StrongARM processor, each implemented with 0.35-micron technology.