PowerPC
lastmod 2018-08-17created 2016-05-042 edits
PowerPC (short for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, written PowerPC in English and also abbreviated as PPC) is a RISC instruction set architecture (Instruction Set Architecture) announced in 1991 by the AIM alliance formed by Apple, IBM, Motorola, and others. The PowerPC instruction set has continued to evolve and was renamed Power ISA in 2006, but even after that, PowerPC has remained in use as a collective name for several processors based on the Power architecture.
The PowerPC architecture itself specifies the instruction set, register set, memory addressing, cache model, and so on that form the basis of operation, but it does not specify how these are implemented. Therefore, in the extreme case, a processor can still be called a PowerPC processor even if it implements the PowerPC architecture internally with CISC or in software.
Because of this characteristic, models that are actually manufactured usually include components not specified at the architecture level (L2 and L3 caches, related registers, etc.) to increase speed.
Originally the CPU was developed in this sense for the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) platform, but since nothing other than the CPU was developed, it is also the only outcome of the PowerPC family of projects that survives to this day. PowerPC was used in Apple Computer's Power Mac. Beyond that, it is used in some IBM workstations, servers, and BlueGene/L, as well as in supercomputers.
It also has a small board size and low power consumption, and IP cores for Xilinx FPGAs are also provided.
It is currently developed and manufactured by Freescale Semiconductor, spun off from Motorola, and by IBM.