IBM Plans Collaboration On Power Architecture

TheInternet writes "According to CNET News, IBM has made a series of announcements regarding the opening-up of the Power chip architecture. The story lacks technical details, but apparently, IBM is going to divulge more information about Power/PowerPC, and expects collaboration from the industry on the future of the chip. Nick Donofrio is quoted as saying: 'We will free electronics manufacturers from the limitations of proprietary microprocessor architectures', and Red Hat and Sony are two companies listed as taking part. Power5 was also shown, as was the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, using 32 500MHz processors to achieve 128 gigaflops."

Comments

hmm

[User 956]

This fits with IBM's vision for spreading the 970. There's two groups: "Pervasive" and "Deep." IBM uses "pervasive" to describe a wide range wired and wireless devices powered by the 970 chips, (i.e. p2p sharing of naked petrified natalie portman pictures). "Deep" computing describes IBM's high performance technical computing products, like Blue Gene.

Opening the architecture swings the door for pervasive market penetration, indeed.

I was there

[deadline]

I attended the event. It is pretty big news. There was a lot of interesting presentations and it is really an astounding direction for IBM. As one person from IBM put it,

IBM has seen how well the Open Source/Community model has worked for Linux. Now they believe that it will benefit the deployment of POWER derived technology.

The details are a little sketchy at this point, but Wladawsky-Berger basically said this is of the same magnitude as the decision to embrace Linux.

I think I heard the word "community" in almost every other sentence. I truly believe IBM "gets it" and is moving forward in bold direction. The people I talked to afterward were credible and excited.

There will be a longer story on ClusterWorld tomorrow. (sign up for three free issues of the magazine as well)

I saw the small "Blue Gene" system. Very cool both performance wise and thermally (32 CPUs in a table top box). I also saw the new Power blade server. Nice.

Re:ATX PowerPC

[stilwebm]

This highlights a fact that the previous poster missed. The architectures of the Pentium 4 and Itanium families are vastly different from the "x86 architecture" in the previous generations of chips. The x86 instruction set is there and the chip presents itself in a backwords compatible way to the system. The innards are vastly evolved, however. A similar analogy is the leap from the Pentium Pro/II/III architecture or K6 architecture to the Athlon architecture.

SPARC, MIPS, and PA-RISC have had relatively minor architecture changes over the same time period. The IBM Power chips have had much better evolutionary gains.