Freescale will reveal the 90nm processor which may drive the next generation of Mac notebooks at a conference today. Freescale is the name for what was formerly Motorola"s processor manufacturing wing, which has now been unleashed as an independent company. A press release from the company confirms it will introduce the chip, which it describes as: "The MPC7448 discrete processor, a higher-performance, lower-power successor to the popular MPC7447A PowerPC device, announced in February 2004".
The advantage for this processor - and for firms employing it in devices - is that it is pin-for-pin compatible with the MPC7447A. It also offers 1MB of L2 cache and is expected to exceed 1.5 GHz in speeds. The new processor (a variant of Freescale"s new e600 PowerPC cores) will be manufactured using 90 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) copper interconnect technology.