IBM plans to announce on Friday that it has begun mass production of 90-nanometer PowerPC chips, which offer improved speed and energy efficiency over their predecessors. “The PowerPC 970FX, which is used inside IBM’s blade servers and Apple’s Xserve G5, is the first processor to be made with this manufacturing method,” reports CNET News.com. “Big Blue is expected to describe a 2.5GHz version of the chip made on the 90-nanometer process at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco next week. PowerPCs on the market today, produced on a 130-nanometer process, top out at 2GHz.”
