In the blue corner! The PowerPC 601, backed by IBM, Motorola and Apple. And in the red corner! The Pentium, flanked by Intel and PC-clone manufacturers. The battle continues, fired up with Apple’s introduction of the Power Macintoshes!
It sometimes seems as though cables companies really ought to offer pay-per-view broadcasts of the eternal power struggle between these two radically different camps. Everybody in the computer industry is talking about it. Arguing about it. Staking their future upon it. The battle between the Pentium and PowerPC 601 has escaped no one.
But what are the facts? Which is a better processor? Which is faster? Which really costs less? In a nutshell: The PowerPC 601 processor is much cheaper and consistently outperforms a same-speed Pentium at most tasks. The Pentium’s main advantage is that it offers much greater speeds than the 486 chip and maintains backward compatibility. Unfortunately, this is also a big disadvantage – to maintain backwards compatibility, many bottlenecks existent in the 20-year old CISC (complex-instruction set computing) technology must remain in the processor. The chip is larger and hotter, and this significantly increases the overall cost of Pentium systems.
Intel isn’t standing still. It realizes it has a competitive disadvantage, and it currently working on the next-generation Pentium chip (the P6) which will address the heat dissipation problems and allegedly achieve speeds of up to 150MHz. But is this really solving its problems?
Apple, Motorola and IBM have very recently announced a 100MHz PowerPC 601 processor, which will be available in quantity by the summer. This is not, however, the extent of their efforts. The PowerPC consortium’s biggest promise lays in their future plans. The PowerPC 604, which should be available in limited quantities by year-end, will perform approximately twice as fast as the PowerPC 601. The PowerPC 620, to debut by the summer of 1995, should offer six to ten times the performance of the 601. That’s up to 1000% speed improvement!
Intel has run into a dead-end. The older CISC technology used in the Pentium processor has reached its limits. Sure, the P6 may be able to keep up to the PowerPC 601, but what about the 604? Or the 620? The reality of the situation must be truly frightening to Intel. With no revolutionary successor to the Pentium in sight (RISC or otherwise), Intel is a dog chasing it's tail, whose future is confused and without direction. It hardly surprising to learn that even Microsoft is thinking about jumping ship, contracting Motorola to port Windows NT to the PowerPC.
Motorola, Apple and IBM are poised for a knock-out. The PowerPC processor has the guts of a winner. It will certainly take some fancy foot-work by Intel to get out of this corner.
