Motorola PowerPC 603

Historia

PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance (AIM). Power (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) and was adopted from IBMs POWER architecture from their RS/6000 series. The PowerPC is designed along RISC principles, and allows for a superscalar implementation. Versions of the design exist in both 32-bit and 64-bit implementations. Starting with the basic POWER specification, the PowerPC added: big or little-endian modes (requiring a reset) single-precision floating point in addition to double-precision additional floating point instructions at the behest of Apple a complete 64-bit specification, which is backward compatible with the 32-bit mode removal of some of the more esoteric POWER instructions, which are emulated in microcode The first single-chip implementation of the design was the MCP601 and released in Apples PowerMac in March 1994