• 1994

Hardware Description

The PowerPC 603 was the first processor implementing the complete 32-bit PowerPC Architecture as specified. It was designed to be a low cost, low end processor for portable and embedded use. One of the main features was power saving functions (doze, nap and sleep mode) that could dramatically reduce power requirements, drawing only 2 mW in sleep mode. The 603 has a four-stage pipeline and five execution units: integer unit, floating point unit, branch prediction unit, load/store unit and a system registry unit. It has separate 8 KB L1 caches for instructions and data and a 32/64 bit 60x memory bus, reaching up to 75 MHz. The 603 core did not have hardware support for SMP.