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General News

IBM PowerPC 403 will power Thomson set-top

Fishkill, N.Y. (Nov 13, 1995)-- Billing it as a major foray into the consumer chip market, IBM Microelectronics confirmed last week that it will supply the embedded PowerPC for a huge set-top-box order won recently by Thomson Consumer Electronics.

In September, Indianapolis-based Thomson was selected by an interactive-TV alliance to supply up to 3 million wireless set-top boxes. Last week, Thompson selected IBM's 32-bit PowerPC microcontroller for the new box expected to be available in selected markets in 1996. The embedded PowerPC 403 will run OS/Open, a bare-bones kernel from IBM.

603 News

603ev/166 trounces Pentium/133 (Nov 2, 1995)

603ev/166 trounces Pentium/133 on SPECint95 and Byte-int, even when comparing a slighly enhanced note book vs a desktop.

Proc.      Pentium   Pentium   604       604        603ev
MHz        133       133       133       133        166
System     Hot box   Micron    Hot Box   Carolina   Woodfield+
L2         1M        256K      1M        512K       512K
Memory     EDO       EDO       SDRAM     DRAM       DRAM

SPECint95  3.68      -         4.9       4.55       3.93
Byte-int             1.92                2.92       3.37 
Byte-fp              1.63                2.97       2.40

All based on preliminary measurements made by Dave Jaffe of PPS performance. Woodfield is a notebook, the system used here has added cache and more memory. Even better (+10-15%) results would be expected if the 603ev was placed in a performance optimized system. ^M

Stuff

Advances in the Intel Microprocessor

Speed increases and transistor density illustrate the phenomenal performance and complexity growth for microprocessors, the brains of personal computers.

MICROPROCESSOR    SPEED (MIPS)*  TRANSISTORS  INTRODUCED
4004                   0.06           2,300       1971
8080                   0.6            6,000       1974
8086                   0.8           29,000       1978
80286                  2.7          134,000       1982
386                    6.0          275,000       1985
486                   13.0        1,185,000       1991
Pentium              100.0      3.1 million       1993
Pentium Pro          440.0      5.5 million       1995

*Millions of instructions per second.
Source: Intel

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