October 3, 2006 – IBM Corp. has announced new low-power additions to its Power Architecture line of microprocessors, claiming that the chips, built with 90nm processes and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, offer either significantly improved performance and/or up to half the power consumption as their predecessors.

Two new PowerPC single-core processors: the PowerPC 750CL (32Bit), which IBM says consumes half the energy as its predecessor; the PowerPC 970GX (32/64Bit), a follow-on to the PowerPC 970FX, with the same power capabilities but twice the integrated L2 cache (1MB); and the CPC965, a companion chip to its 970 series offering “significantly less power [usage] than comparative bridge chips.”

IBM also has unveiled three new 32Bit process cores: a 460S synthesizable core, plus two ASIC hard cores: the 464 H90, and 464FP H90 (which adds an integrated double precision floating point unit). The cores are high performance with similar power requirements as their predecessors — IBM says the 464 H90 hard core is expected to dissipate slightly more than half (530mW) a Watt at 1GHz performance.

The new PowerPC chips are available now, with CPC965 samples shipping in March 2007. A preliminary design kit for the 464 H90 hard core is expected to be available by year’s end, with a kit for the 464FP H90 as well as the general availability of the 460s targeted for 1Q07.

IBM notes the PowerPC chips processors target applications including communications, storage, multimedia and graphics based devices, while the ASIC cores are designed for embedded applications ranging from networking to aerospace and defense to consumer electronics.