Mobile devices Toolkit

Driving PowerPC forward

Tags:
G4,
PowerPC,
G5

Michael Singer CNET News

Published: 08 Dec 2005 14:45 GMT

...not a good use of our resources to try to defend half a percent market share, which is how much desktop we have against Intel.

OK, Intel has the PC, that's fine. There are so many opportunities outside the PC that it's much better using our resources to try to go into spaces where we are really leaders.

Innovation is moving away from the PC space, and it's moving to consumer electronics. It's moving to the game console. It's moving to cars. It's moving to phones. iPod, that's where innovation is. So desktop is not a market that we want to serve.

Weren't you there during the discussions when IBM convinced Apple to adopt the G5?
In my previous job, I ran IBM's semiconductor business. So I've seen both sides of the Apple story, because I sold the G5 to Steve [Jobs] the first time he wanted to move to Intel.

Five years ago?
Yeah, that's about right. So I sold the G5. First I told IBM that we needed to do it, and then I sold it to Apple that the G5 was good and it was going to be the follow-on of the PowerPC road map for the desktop. It worked pretty well. And then IBM decided not to take the G5 into the laptop and decided to really focus its chip business on the game consoles.

Because there is no innovation left on the PC?
It's not that the PC is dead. It's a huge business.

We are most probably going to revitalise our PowerPC. I don't know if it's going to be called PowerPC. A lot of people have questions on the PowerPC architecture and what's going on. I think IBM and us need to make a very strong statement that, "Hey, a lot of applications are using that architecture, it's alive, it's there to last, don't get confused because there are many more PowerPC chips than IBM's Power architecture chips sold in the world."

Because people have that personal link to that PC, they tend to equate processing with PCs, and they don't realise that there are increasingly tens, if not hundreds, of processors that you use every day, and those things are quickly becoming much more powerful.

You're going to be shocked I'm sure, but the PowerPC drives the engine control, the power train application in some automobiles. And by next year, 50 percent of car [models] in the world will have PowerPCs.

That's a lot of processing power for fuel injection in a car. Does it really need a microprocessor like a PowerPC?
Yes.

Why?
Because you have hundreds of thousands of lines of code running on some car systems already. People don't realize how complex cars have become.

Name a car.
The BMW 7 Series V6... it sits on the side of the six cylinders. Today, it is a 16-bit PowerPC chip.

And next year it'll be a 32-bit?
32-bit.

So right now, if I tore apart a BMW and took out all the silicon, how many Freescale chips would I find?
52 Freescale chips in both the 7 Series and the 5 series.

And they control…?
Air bag deployment, moving the seats, the power train, Telematics, OnStar, entertainment systems, the transmission...

So instead of sitting in front of your PC, you're actually driving your PC?
Right.

Talk about spreading your wings and moving away from Motorola. Has that been beneficial for you, or has it been actually a challenge? Freescale is not a household name.
Of course, Motorola is a very strong brand, and we are very proud of the Motorola heritage...Now that being said, we are not a consumer brand. We sell to people who design products...so for them, I really believe we are already a household name.