CNET News takes a look at IBM's PowerPC 970FX chip and the likely roadmap IBM plans to take the POWER line. From the article:
The next-generation chip will have technology that lets it run multiple operating systems simultaneously, said Karl Freund, vice president, IBM eServer pSeries. Doing so allows a computer to handle more jobs at the same time and to be used more efficiently.
With the next-generation PowerPC 970, IBM plans to run that hardware management console instead as software in a separate partition, he said. Freund declined to comment on when in 2005 the chip is scheduled to arrive but said it's "pretty late in the design cycle now." Apple plans to use it, he added.
He also wouldn't comment on another possible feature of the coming chip: dual processing cores. Sun and HP sell dual-core chips today; comparatively mainstream dual-core designs are coming from Intel and AMD in 2005. So it stands to reason IBM will adopt the idea in its own PowerPC 970 line.
A single-core version of the IBM 970FX chip is currently used in the Power Mac G5 line of desktop computers, as well as the iMac G5 line.
