International Business Machines has released a processor that may find home inside notebooks by Apple Computer. The new PowerPC 970FX chip with lowered power consumption is expected to operate within thermal envelopes much below those of Intel Pentium M processor and still provide relatively high performance.

“This newest offering is targeted for clients who desire a low-cost 64-bit processor featuring high performance, a sub-20 Watt power envelope and SMP,” IBM said in a statement.

The new PowerPC 970FX product with decreased power consumption is a single-core 32-/64-bit processor that operates at up to 1.60GHz. The new PowerPC 970FX includes a 512KB L2 cache, L1 instruction cache holds 64 KB, the L1 data cache holds 32 KB, the processor system bus is capable of delivering up to 7.1GB/s to keep the processor core and the SIMD/Vector engine fed with data. The processor core can dispatch five instructions per cycle, and issue one instruction per cycle to each of its ten execution units, including two fixed point, two floating point, two load store, two vector and two system units.

The new PowerPC 970FX microprocessor is designed to provide an operating power of 13W at 1.40GHz and 16W at 1.60GHz under typical workloads. The microprocessor also provides power-saving features that system architects can use to dynamically control the system power.

IBM did not reveal when the new chip hits the market.