According to a New York Times story, IBM will be presenting
a paperdescribing a complete PowerPC processor, that runs at
1 gigahertz, at the International
Solid State Circuits Conference that opened Monday in San
Francisco. IBM says that these gigahertz chips (that's a billion
cycles per second to you and me) should reach production status
in the second half of this year.
The article goes on to state that these processors
will first appear in servers where the demand for high-end
chips to expedite Web page serving and e-commerce order processing,
is great. Demand for these chips is also expected to be driven
by computational intensive applications such as voice recognition
and video.
According to Randall D. Isaac, a vice president at IBM Research,
"The gigahertz era has arrived, and it looks like we
have room to move up to the 3 or 4 gigahertz range very rapidly.
Everyone talked about these limits, the end of Moore's
Law, everything was going to slow down. But everything
seems to be speeding up."
The PowerPC gigahertz chip that IBM
expects to be shipping in the second half of this year will
be a 64-bit version. They also plan to introduce a gigahertz
version of the System 390 processor that is mainly used in
mainframe computers.
Not to be outdone
Intel said that it has a gigahertz version of the 32-bit
Pentium III in the works, and is suppose to outline details
of its 64-bit Itanium processor at the conference. Both chips
are slated to be released in the second half of this year.
AMD also
said they will have a gigahertz version of their Intel compatible
Athlon processor ready for the second half of the year.
It will be interesting to see if these manufacturers can
keep to these time tables and get the chips out the door in
the time frame planned, or whether this is more of a spitting
contest at the conference. Motorola has been having problems
supplying the 500Mhz
G4 processor due to manufacturing problems, but we are
unsure whether the IBM chip will be a G3 or a G4 chip.
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According to a New York Times story, IBM will be presenting
a paperdescribing a complete PowerPC processor, that runs at
1 gigahertz, at the