The making of the PowerPC microprocessor

The alliance of Apple, IBM and Motorola was formed with the vision of designing a microprocessor family able to span the scope of systems from microcontrollers to supercomputers with a common instruction set architecture and able to run common applications on all of the systems built using these processors. The result was the PowerPC Architecture, a third-generation RISC architecture optimized for the diverse computing requirements of the future. The Somerset Design Center was set up with the mission to jointly develop microprocessors based on the PowerPC Architecture.