With AMD and Intel fighting over the spot light for the best mobile processor one competitor is left out. That competitor is IBM, is IBM developing a mobile version of its PowerPC processor?
The 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor will undoubtedly be a fixture of Apple CEO Steve Jobs" keynote next week"s Worldwide Developers Conference. After all, it"s the basis of the company"s workstation and server lines. But Mac professionals, and even Linux programmers, will be waiting for word of a mobile version. According to officials of IBM Corp., the technology for a notebook version of the PowerPC G5, a k a the PowerPC 970 series of processors, may be at hand.
IBM"s PowerPC 970 family of microprocessors has quietly become a rarity in the computing world: a one-size-fits-all architecture used for notebooks, desktops and even low-end servers. The chip is based on the company"s longstanding POWER architecture, a dual-core processor used in some of IBM"s server lines. Now, IBM is being asked to migrate those chips into the crucial notebook market while simultaneously designing an architecture that can be competitive in low-end servers.