PowerPC 603
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The PowerPC 603 was the first microprocessor implementing the 32-bit PowerPC Architecture as specified (its predecessor, the PowerPC 601, was a hybrid of POWER and PowerPC; the 603 removed the POWER-specific instructions). It was built by IBM. It was largely used as a low-cost and mobile/low-power processor in Apple Macintosh hardware, beginning with the PowerBook 5300 series. The initial run of the processor was slower than expected, especially on Apple hardware where it was initially used without a L2 cache, causing serious processor bottlenecks. It was replaced with the PowerPC 603e and 603ev (an internal name not used by IBM marketing), which solved many of the on-chip speed issues.
The 603e was also used in accelerator cards from Phase5 for the Amiga line of computers, with CPUs ranging in speeds from 160 to 240 MHz.
The 603 architecture is directly ancestral to the PowerPC 750 architecture, marketed by Apple as the PowerPC G3.
