SOI speeds up Motorola chip

Source: ZDNet

Motorola hopes to prove that it can teach an old chip new tricks.
On Monday, the company launched a new 1GHz PowerPC 7455 chip that is the engine for a new lineup of Apple Computer Power Macs, as well as for new networking equipment.

The new PowerPC, which is part of Motorola's G4 family of chips, boasts higher clock speed and lower power consumption than previous versions of the chip. The enhancements come from a newer manufacturing process that includes silicon on insulator (SOI), which has chiefly been a feature in high-end server chips.

Motorola is the first chipmaker to bring SOI to the desktop. The process places an insulator between a transistor and the silicon bed that a transistor rests upon inside a chip.