PowerPC
Main article: PowerPC
In 1991 IBM realized that they might be able to make POWER a high-volume architecture by making and selling chips to other system manufacturers. They approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture. Soon after, Apple, as one of Motorola's largest customers of desktop-class microprocessors, asked Motorola to join the discussions because of their long relationship, their more extensive experience with manufacturing high-volume microprocessors than IBM and to serve as a second source for the microprocessors. This three-way collaboration became known as the AIM alliance, for Apple, IBM, Motorola.
The result after 2 years of development in 1993 was the PowerPC architecture, a modified version of the POWER architecture. The PowerPC architecture added single-precision floating point instructions and general register-to-register multiply and divide instructions, and removed some POWER features such as the specialized multiply and divide instructions using the MQ register. It also added a 64-bit version of the architecture.
The first PowerPC chip was the PowerPC 601, based on the RSC. See the PowerPC page for more information on PowerPC.