Thread

Yellow PowerPC 601

Yellow PowerPC 601 PowerPC 4 posts Apr 13, 2009 — Apr 16, 2009

#1 Mon, 13 Apr 2009 - 02:54

Hmm, apparently the Apple PPC upgrade cards for the Quadras used a yellow PowerPC 601. linky

I honestly never knew that yellow chips were used in shipping products..I've only ever seen them in PR photos before, so I just assumed that all production model 601s were blue.

#2 Mon, 13 Apr 2009 - 14:55

the 601 on my card is yellow as well...

#3 Mon, 13 Apr 2009 - 17:00

Why is there a VLSI ARM CPU next to the PowerPC?

#4 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 - 20:53

I've seen the yellow 601s on x100 Power Macs before, but unfortunately most were broken physically.

Why is there a VLSI ARM CPU next to the PowerPC?

Good question. I'd guess that it likely functioned as the bridge between the 60x bus and the '040 bus, with the ARM core performing operations such as byte reordering or translation, and maybe handling the transition between the 68k and PPC environment via the control panel.