Electric Monk's Profile

The Beginners Guide to: Apple's selection of current and upcoming processors (Freescale edition) Freescale was Motorola's chip division, and is now an independent company. They have a very good track record on designing really nice chips, and a very bad track record at producing and scaling them. To some extent this is because Motorola's fabs (where chips are made) were pretty bad; dirty and old. This has been solved with a move to the ultramodern Crolles fab in association with several other companies. Their design team on the other hand was always considered one of the best, a major reason the G4 was able to best Intel's chip offerings despite slower clock speeds and a weaker bus. IBM's chip division has been around for a very long time. Currently they use the modern fab at Fishkill to produce chips. Both companies have presumably had problems with the transition to 90nm from 130nm which allows chips to be faster, use less power, and be produced in larger numbers in the same size area. In theory. IBM's (and Intel's) problems have been fairly widely publicized. Freescale hasn't said anything, but their roadmap seems conservative unless they have had problems. However Motorola had an ongoing problem meeting their roadmap targets, any roadmap published by Freescale should be taken with a grain of salt. They are Apple's two suppliers for processors. IBM will not be covered, because frankly I don't know enough about their chips. Freescale supplies the 7447 and 7447A for use the eMac, the Mac Mini, iBooks, and Powerbooks (The new Rev C (15")/D(12"/17") PB's are probably using the 7447B). The 7447, 7447A, and 7447B are all similar chips. They have a 512 kb L2 cache with no L3 cache. Their max bus speed is 167 MHz. The 7447 has a top clock speed of 1.33 GHz, the A model can hit 1.5 GHz, and the B model can reach 1.67 GHz. Although they use DDR memory, the slow bus speed prevents utilizing the full speed of the fast DDR memory. The 745x series has a L3 cache but does not scale as well as the 744x series. The 745x is used by a number of upgrade manufactures such as Powerlogix and Sonnet. Upcoming is the 7448 with a top clock speed of 1.8-2.0 GHz and a bus speed of 200 MHz along with a larger 1 MB L2 cache. The 7448 is currently being sampled, with production sometime in the next 6 months. Could be less, could be more. After the 7448 (which is basically a final upgrade to the 744x that is years late in some respects) comes the advanced e600 series. The e600 has a large number of very nice features and comes in single and dual core versions that are pin compatible with each other. It comes with 1 or 2 PCI Express I/O interfaces. It has a 1 MB L2 cache per core. 4 10/100/1000 Ethernet controllers (needed for embedded hardware use) A memory controller for each core, allowing full speed use of DDR2 memory. A 667 MHz integrated MPX bus. Far faster then external buses. It has 4 integer, a floating point, and 4 Altivec units per core. Rapid I/O interface. This chip is sampling in the second half of this year, with production sometime in the first half of 2006. After that comes the e700 core, 32/64 bit with clock speeds beyond 3 GHz. It is unknown when this chip will be sampled or produced.