Heard on the Beat

Power Boost: Motorola Inc. announced improvements today to its PowerPC microprocessor line that should make its chips for computing and specialized electronic devices run faster and use far less power. That’s good news for Apple Computer Inc., the largest consumer of Motorola’s chips for PCs.

The new PowerPC 750 series chips will run at 366, 333 and 300 megahertz and 1.9 volts--compared with earlier versions that consumed far more power and were capped at 300 megahertz.

Industry analysts say that Apple’s PowerBook notebook computers will derive the greatest benefit and should be able to outpace notebooks based on Intel Corp. processors, which tend to consume much more power at higher speeds.