IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing

New submitter HAL11000 was the first of many to write with news that IBM and others have formed a new consortium to license the POWER architecture to third parties "IBM puts up POWER architecture for licensing and announces the OpenPower Consortium with Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Tyan." Quoting El Reg: "The plan, according to McCredie, is to open up the intellectual property for the Power architecture and to allow customizations by licensees, just like ARM Holdings has done brilliantly with its ARM processors ... Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems. ... Tyan will presumably be working on alternative motherboards to the ones that IBM has manufactured for its own use." There are mentions of the POWER firmware being "open sourced," but it is unclear if that actually means Open Source or something more like the Open Group's definition of open (vendors only).

Comments

Re:A Little Late?

[drinkypoo]

PowerPC cores are incredibly more ubiquitous than you probably believe. They show up all over the place. Hell, Motorola Cellphones had old tired PPC cores in them for some time, since as a contributor Moto had a license to make embedded PPC chips. And of course, it's well-known that there's a tri-core PPC in the Xbox 360. There's also a castrated little PPC core in the front of the PS3's processor, where there was a MIPS core in the PS2's. And there's a ton of little MIPS-based portable computers out there, but in recent times their sales have been cannibalized by ARM. There's no reason to believe that there couldn't be a ton of little PPC-based portables out there, if PPC were licensed like ARM. Now, allegedly, it will be. Probably too little too late, though.