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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).
Shouldn't they have done this while Apple was still using the PPC? At number of developers and developer tools available for PPC back then has to be orders of magnitude higher than it is today. Better late than never?
Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems.
Nvidia hasn't quite figured out how to get their thermal energy per square centimeter to the level of a nuclear reactor, so I'm sure opening up the POWER series of chips has them quite excited on that front.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
...that spy^H anonymously profile your behaviour at the microcode level? I'll pass, x86 SMM is already evil enough for me.
We could run Clasic Mac and Sillicon Graphics!
Classic Mac and old Silicon Graphics machines did not use PowerPC. They used MC68k CPUs. Later Macs used PowerPC, but SGI never used them, going to 64-bit MIPS CPUs instead.
I can't wait for the return of Motorola Starmax, Umax Supermac and Power Computing's Power Tower Pro. I remember my Power Tower Pro was upgradeable to 1 GB of ram in 1997! Shut up and take my money!
The headline and summary are confusing, Power is licensed and Power based chips are produced by third parties. Applied Micro (AMCC) along with Freescale make power core based CPU's/SoC's for embedded use and Xilinx has power cores in their high end Virtex 5 FPGA's. A-EON uses the AMCC Power CPU on mATX motherboards for modern Amiga systems. What they mean is that IBM is making it easier for others to license and adopt Power for their needs. Though the Gamecube, Wii, Wii-U, Xbox 360 and PS3 use power processors, they are all made by IBM like the Apple Power CPU's.
Its good to see more RISC architectures that have been around for a while becoming more popular. The mobile market pretty much bought RISC back into the spotlight and is giving x86 a run for its money. And more interesting are the partners and the task Power is looking to solve: the cloud (I feel dirty using that phrase). Intel better watch out, with everyone pushing software as a service and mainfr^H^H^H cloud computing, companies are looking to create hardware targeted towards those tasks while also reducing power.
Somehow I feel it dilutes the word "open"
You're thinking about it the wrong way. Consider instead:
IBM are open to the idea of taking your money.
That is the fundemental idea of openness behind it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
From the perspective of most supercomputer users, the problem here is that you want to use something which is not Fortran or C. Very little hardcore numerical stuff is done outside of those two languages. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it is the reason why there's so little incentive to have good compiler support.
Impressive. You are wrong on just about *everything* you wrote:
>>POWER support is dead on all enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat dropped support with EL5.
Nope and nope and nope
>>Furthermore OpenPower boxes are contractually prohibited from running AIX.
You are confusing this announcement with a previous attempt at the Linux market that was also called OpenPower. Those systems only ran Linux and could not run AIX. This announcement is about opening up the entire platform and licencing out parts or whole cores of the actual high end chips to companies like Google, who recognize that the single most expensive component in servers is the CPU - and they want choice and customization.
>>You've got a box of hardware with nothing to run on it and it can only deliver half the performance of comparatively priced Intel equipment.
The recently released Power7+ chip running Linux is the fastest thing on the market right now.
>> If you outsource support to IBM, their support specialists in the delivery centers will accidentally nuke your whole frame during routine maintenance, and you could be down for days
Umm..ok I'm stopping now
FUNK!
Power.org manages the ppc ISA.
The ppc ISA is and has been completely open. You can design and create your own chips based on it and people do.
This is about opening up, or decomposing, the development of the high end POWER chips that IBM develops. Large data center companies have an increasing desire for customized chips. Customizing chips is not what Intel is good at or want to be good at. The only game box win that Intel had was the original XBOX and that was a massive failure, partly because of the inflexibility of Intel and their precious margins. I really can't think of any other custom wins that Intel has had since.
If Google wants to cobble together a small 2-4 core Power Chip with exactly the parts they need, based on licensed pieces from IBM, and then go fab it at wherever is cheapest, I've got to think that will save them money versus being a mountain of retail Intel chips.
FUNK!
Possibly, but it better have a snappy marketing name that conveys both it's hardcore POWER roots, and it's friendly personal computer approachability, and it needs to have a short acronym that can fit into the same column width as "x86" and "ARM" on benchmark charts.
Maybe they could call it "PowerPC", or "PPC" for short...
0 1 - just my two bits
You can get the 'advance' toolchain. It's basically an upstream gnu toolchain, with a lot more optimizations and support for ppc chips.
Looks like LLVM is getting improved as well.
FUNK!
A few words about Linux technologies that originated from solid positions within the IBM camp...
YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) Yellowdog is a well-known RPM-based Linux distribution for the POWER architecture. JFS The OS/2 native filesystem was incorporated into Linux and released to production in June, 2001. NUMA IBM's acquisition of Sequent eventually led to NUMA code releases for the kernel which have been particularly appropriate for Hypertransport and QPI - high-performance Linux ows much to IBM. DB2 While not a free product, the UDB database is likely the largest competetor/option to Oracle on Linux.Linux owes a great deal to IBM.