At last week's Linley Tech Processor Conference, IBM announced the successor to its PowerPC 440/464 CPUs, the PowerPC 476FP. Able to issue up to five instructions at a time and process instructions out of order, the 476FP will likely achieve industry-leading single-thread throughput for a CPU core. Having a nine-stage pipeline and implemented as a hard core, the 476FP is conservatively rated at 1.6GHz in IBM's 45nm SOI process. In this configuration, the core measures 3.6mm2 and consumes 1.6W. Customers can begin designing ASICs using the CPU in October. IBM expects the first 476FP-based products to qualify for production in 2010. A synthesizable version will also be available.

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