Inside the Machine

Conclusion

The 600 series saw the PPC line go from the new kid on the block to a mature RISC alternative that brought Apple’s PowerMac workstation to the forefront of personal computing performance. While the initial 601 had a few teething problems, the line was in great shape after the 603e and 604e made it to market. The 603e was a superb mobile chip that worked well in Apple’s laptops, and even though it had a more limited instruction dispatch/commit bandwidth and a smaller cache than the 601, it still managed to beat its predecessor because of its more efficient use of transistors.

The 604 doubled the 603’s instruction dispatch and commit bandwidth, and it sported a wider back end and a larger instruction window that enabled its back end to ...