Macintosh Processor Upgrade: Description

This article provides a description of the Macintosh Processor Upgrade, which has been discontinued.

The Macintosh Processor Upgrade is a card that upgrades some 68040 systems to the PowerPC microprocessor. It is available for the Macintosh Quadra 605, Macintosh LC 475, Performa 47x, Macintosh LC 57x, Performa 57x, Macintosh LC 580, Performa 58x, Macintosh LC 630, Macintosh Quadra 630, and Performa 630 series of computers. Note that the Macintosh Processor Upgrade does not support speech recognition. The Macintosh Processor Upgrade must be installed by an Apple authorized service provider as installation requires a CPU extraction tool. Once installed, the upgrade occupies the LC-PDS slot of your Macintosh computer.

Featuring a PowerPC 601 microprocessor running at either 50MHz or 66MHz (the upgrade runs at double the speed of the computer's existing microprocessor), the upgrade card is expected to boost performance up to two to four times on existing Macintosh models when running applications optimized for Power Macintosh. Applications employing floating point functions, such as graphics programs, may enjoy a performance boost of up to 10 times.

This new upgrade includes 256K of cache, and lets you switch back and forth between the PowerPC 601 and 68040/68LC040 processors upon restart.


Features of Macintosh Processor Upgrade

Power and speed

* Includes PowerPC 601 microprocessor with floating-point processor and 32K cache.
* PowerPC chip runs at double the processor speed of your Macintosh computer
* Includes 256K level-2 cache

Compatibility

* Macintosh System 7.5 (included)
* On-board Power Macintosh ROM
* Runs programs written for Power Macintosh
* Runs Macintosh programs
* Runs MS-DOS and Windows programs (with third-party SoftWindows software)