IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture. In early 1991 IBM realized that their design could potentially become a high-volume microprocessor used across the industry. Work on a single-chip POWER microprocessor, called the RSC ( RISC Single Chip) began.
IBM soon realized that they would need a single-chip microprocessor to scale their RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines. The original POWER microprocessor, one of the first superscalar RISC implementations, was a high performance, multi-chip design. The result was the POWER architecture, introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990. The RT had disappointing performance and IBM started the America Project to build the fastest processor on the market. 801-based cores were used in a number of IBM embedded products, eventually becoming the 16-register ROMP processor used in the IBM RT. The history of the PowerPC begins with IBM's 801 prototype chip of John Cocke's RISC ideas in the late 1970s. The “PC” in “PowerPC” originally stood for “Performance Computing” despite the coincidence of IBM’s involvement in the development of the PowerPC architecture, it is not in any way related to the IBM PC.
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PowerPC is largely based on IBM's earlier POWER architecture, and retains a high level of compatibility with it the architectures have remained close enough that the same programs and operating systems will run on both if some care is taken in preparation newer chips in the POWER series implement the full PowerPC instruction set. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIM's PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s and while the architecture is well known for being used by Apple's Macintosh lines from 1994 to 2006 (before Apple's transition to Intel), its use in video game consoles and embedded applications far exceeded Apple's use.
Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been renamed Power ISA but lives on as a legacy trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture based processors. PowerPC (short for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM.
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