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

IBM -- How many human tears for a GFLOP or a MIP?

[turtleshadow]

All this talk of opening up the Power 5 architecture just means to me that IBM is exiting the hard side of the manufacturing business and entering into being a designer and integrator; all the while and letting the poisonous drudge work to be done in various countries where public & workers rights are not well enforced.

IBM has moved assembly of Thinkpad , Netvista/Adaptiva (really Sanmima-SCI), and mid end Servers to outside the US to be a player. Now comes the egress of high end chips design work and assembly/integration.

Eventually IBM won't manufacture supercomputers in the USA at all but will design them, have some subcontractor build them then import them under the IBM name and sell them to the US GOV.

How many broken backs, destroyed environments, and tears for a cheap GFLOP or a MIP?

Re:Lets hope they actually mean it, unlike sun.

[h8sg8s]

Clearly you don't understand the use of "open" in the SPARC case. It's arguably the most open CPU standard out there. Everyone is pissed off at Sun for this perceived lack of "openness" when in fact they practically invented the term (see SPARC, OpenOffice, Java, etc, etc, etc...) Let's see IBM open source DB2 or AIX before you start chunking stones at Sun.