Published February 23, 2000
IBM spawned a deal that would set the computer industry spinning for years. It was an unholy alliance with Apple and Motorola to co-promote an advanced new computer chip beyond anything from Intel.
IBM knew that the whole of the computer industry would not adopt their newest Power Processor, used in their workstation computers. Alone, IBM rightly reasoned it would fail to gain popular acceptance without outside partners to validate the importance of its reduced instruction set design. IBM also needed to boost awareness of their OS/2 software operating system, competition to Windows.
In a gutsy but successful pitch, the former stuff-shirt enemy to the t-shirt and jeans executives at Apple Computer Company convinced the Macintosh manufacturer to shake hands in a new joint venture. Apple still didn’t trust IBM but had a solid working relationship with Motorola. So the threesome (AIM) became colleagues.
IBM and Motorola set upon the task to design a new processor chip with the instruction set similar to the IBM Power architecture. It would be called the PowerPC, and the design would be openly accessible so other manufacturers could modify it if they chose.
Cooperation among competitors has been largely untried in America, a concept adopted from the Japanese. Together, AIM built an entire research design facility, Somerset, in Austin, Texas. Each company’s infrastructure could be built around a single standardized design.
The results have been enormously successful for all. It is the lowest price per highest performance of the new computer processors in the industry. It is also the fastest clock speed, measured in megahertz (MHz). The family of PPC chips has outperformed the highest Intel machine at half the cost.
AIM freely announced their plans well in advance of product delivery. Intel, accellerated their plans to beat them, pouring ten times the money into new design and implementation than AIM.
Motorola completed its 604 chip which was to be twice as fast as the Pentium. Intel timed the release of their new PentiumPro to coincide with Motorola. The Pro was almost as fast, but consumed enormous power and ran very hot (detrimental to electronics’ longevity and reliability).
For the past five years, AIM has exceeded the Pentium’s performance, at least double the speed and at half the cost. Pentiums consequential physical size, higher price, non-RISC architecture and complexity is clearly a mediocre option in spite of its popular brand name.
In real-world conditions, the PowerPCs are actually twice to three times faster than Pentiums, regardless of Intel’s overly-wishful marketing claims to the contrary. Unix operating systems run almost as fast on Pentiums, but most people use Windows’ NT, Win98, Win95, Win3.1 which are all considerably slower.
For multimedia (sounds and motion), the AIM chip has included Native and Digital Signal Processing. Intel, ignoring this, instead adds on what they call MMX. About five software publishers have rewritten their code for the MMX firmware of the chip. The benchmark tests have improved but not quite equal to the AIM chips’ performance.
The performance growth of Pentiums has stalled, while PowerPCs are the fastest in the world. Apple has a Power Macintsoh model, available in America, that has been banned for export, classified a munition by our defense department.
Analysts, like most experts, are not looking at the entire market. Processor manufacturers’ real money is from many hundred million embedded controllers, like those for cars, microwaves and other products. Companies like Motorola (but not Intel) make their high performance micro-computer chips as a test for their controllers, similar to the auto industry’s Formula-1 racing cars.
IBM already uses the Power Architecture RS/6000s in their AS/400 mini-computer; business is huge. The PowerPC is just a less expensive version. The computer that beat Chess Champion Kasparov was IBM’s Deep-Blue which used 32 PowerPCs. The first variant that lost to Kasparov was built around the Pentiums.
Here too, the profits from the PowerPC are used to subsidize the Research & Development costs for all future advancements. Intel cannot say the same.
The PowerPC chip, a collaborative efforts of three competitors, is a shinning example of distributive responsibilities and profits that have benefited the whole industry. Without their motivation, Intel would have certainly not been (as) motivated to rush improvements for the Pentium users.
The future looks very promising for better, faster, and useful chip designs using the superiority and advantages of the PowerPC. As such, Motorola’s significant position in the market is centered upon the continued success of this RISC (reduced instruction set chip) technology. Likewise, IBM (bigger than Intel) is committed and will not allow the PowerPC to fail.
So look again: What processor is inside?