News 

In a presentation to the Smart Networks Developer Forum held in Disneyland Paris this week, Chuck Corley, director - Applications Engineering, and Glenn Beck, marketing chief of staff, from Motorola Semiconductor's Computing Platforms Division briefly outlined the key elements of the company's current PowerPC strategy. Essentially this involves

ADVERTISEMENT

'process and architecture improvements' that will enable speeds above 3GHz and increased levels of integration between processors, improving the efficiency of the complete system architecture.

To this effect Motorola has added a dual core processor to the roadmap, in layman's terms an integrated and much more efficient alternative to dual processor systems as used by Apple in its current Power Mac range. Dual core processors will also have system integration on the chip, both for handling memory and IO throughput. Dual core systems will go up to 2GHz, but in this context that figure becomes less relevant than ever.

IBM already has dual core PowerPC processors available for server configurations. Dual core processors are also being introduced in handheld devices, to provide rich multimedia alongside traditional data processing, and are rumoured to be at the heart of Sony's forthcoming PS3 gaming device.