The PowerPC 603e microprocessor: an enhanced, low-power, superscalar microprocessor

The PowerPC 603e microprocessor is a high performance, low cost, low power microprocessor designed for use in portable computers. The 603e is an enhanced version of the PowerPC 603 microprocessor and extends the performance range of the PowerPC microprocessor family of portable products. The enhancements include increasing the frequency to 100 MHZ doubling the on-chip instruction and data caches to 16 Kbytes each, increasing the cache associativity to 4-way set-associative, adding an extra integer unit, and increasing the throughput of stores and misaligned accesses. Three new bus modes are added to allow for more flexibility in system design. The estimated performance of the 603e at 100 MHz is 120 SPECint92 and 105 SPECfp92. The 603e is fabricated in the same 3.3 volt, 0.5 micron, four-level metal technology as the 603 and contains 2.6 million transistors. The die size is 98 mm². The typical power consumption of the 603e at 100 MHz is 3 watts. Like the 603, the 603e provides three software controllable power-down modes to further extend power saving capability