Big Blue targets PowerBLADES with 970 chip

A report on Ace's Hardware said IBM will use the up and coming PowerPC 970 chip as the basis for a PowerPC Blades, which it is likely to discuss at the CeBIT show next week.

The 970 is a single core version of the POWER4 processor which has Altivec extensions, and as the site reports, it may well be the chip that powers future Apple computers too.

The 64-bit chip will include symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), has a parity L1, ECC L2 and parity checked system bus, and is made using the .13µ (micron) copper-SOI technology.

It will fly along at between 1.8GHz and 2.5GHz, and so beats the pants off previous microprocessors IBM has released. Ace's also points out that the chips will feature in the Eserver BladeCenter chassis design from Big Blue, and may need a 90 nanometer shrink to achieve the highest promise speed grade.

There's more on this, here. µ

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