The Register is reporting that the Motorola Freescale MPC7448 processor may be the heart of the next PowerBook G4 speed bump.

The new chip is Freescale’s first 90nm G4 and is based on the company’s e600 core, the foundation for Freescale’s upcoming line of dual-core chips. The 7448, however, contains just one core, clocked to beyond 1.5GHz. It contains 32KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2, double the 512KB of L2 found in the MPC7447A currently driving Apple’s PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 notebooks.

The Register is reporting that the Motorola Freescale MPC7448 processor may be the heart of the next PowerBook G4 speed bump.

The new chip is Freescale’s first 90nm G4 and is based on the company’s e600 core, the foundation for Freescale’s upcoming line of dual-core chips. The 7448, however, contains just one core, clocked to beyond 1.5GHz. It contains 32KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2, double the 512KB of L2 found in the MPC7447A currently driving Apple’s PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 notebooks.