IBM Showing Renewed Interest in Personal Computing

For those who thought IBM had forsaken the personal computing market for the big iron, the sale of the PC division to Lenovo was apparently just another deal.

First, we saw that the company is putting renewed effort into the open source offering of Symphony, and putting money-where-mouth-is by having its employees use it in daily operations. That will certainly get the bugs out, and necessary additions into the code, quickly.

Now, it announces a new chip, perhaps in an effort to challenge Intel’s Atom offerings, but certainly something that will muscle ARM’s latest effort into the sidelines.

from TechConnect

Trying to give ARM a bit more competition, Big Blue has stepped up to claim that it has the highest performance, highest throughput processor for system-on-chip (SoC) products. Made in collaboration with LSI, the PowerPC 476FP processor core works at frequencies of over 1.6 GHz and has over two times the performance of IBM’s most advanced embedded core currently available.

The PowerPC 476FP dissipates 1.6W when manufactured in IBM’s 45nm SOI technology and can be paired up with an LSI-designed configurable level 2 (L2) memory cache, the sizes available being of 256KB, 512KB and 1MB.

“We are pleased to announce this new embedded PowerPC processor,” said Richard Busch, IBM director of ASIC products. “This high-performance, power efficient, compact processor core allows customers to meet the needs of today’s applications, while preserving legacy code. Our collaboration with LSI brings together IBM’s expertise in processor development with LSI’s experience in networking and storage architectures, optimizing this core to address today’s high-speed embedded requirements.”

According to IBM, the PowerPC 476FP hardcore will be ready to support designs as of next month and will enter production in Q4 2010. A synthesizable version is also expected in 4Q 2010.

With power savings like that, we can look forward to long battery life in anything outfitted with one of these processors.

The competition will certainly drive prices down, and give more choice of design to those who wish more possibilities. Perhaps we will see entirely new  capabilities with the different designs of the new chips.

The phrase ‘preserving legacy code’ hopefully means that we’ll see lots of compatibility with things already familiar, so that new applications will not be necessary. (I am personally tired of the entire ‘app store’ phenomenon)

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