The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened in 1992 and its goal was to make the first PowerPC processor and then keep designing general purpose PowerPC processors for personal computers. The first incarnation became the PowerPC 601 in 1993, and the second generation soon followed with the PowerPC 603, PowerPC 604 and the 64-bit PowerPC 620.
The PowerPC 601 prototype reached first silicon in October 1992
An 80 MHz PowerPC 601
An IBM manufactured 90 MHz PowerPC 601v. Notice the slightly smaller die.
A 100 MHz Motorola PowerPC 603 in a wire bond Quad Flat Package
PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
IBM PowerPC 601 microprocessor
IBM PowerPC 604e 200 MHz
The Freescale XPC855T Service Processor of a Sun Fire V20z