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

A Little Late?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

Re:A Little Late?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Are IBM hoping that people migrate to AIX or something? (good luck with that!)

A few days ago on the Fedora homepage was announcement of the full release of Fedora 19 for IBM Power, presumably with Linux 3.10. You can get RHEL 6 if you want support and certainly there are debian and netbsd ports in various states. If there's a market for the hardware, the software is ready.

Re:A Little Late?

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't help that Intel and AMD were burning 200 Watts and PPC was at about 15 Watts and people expected similar performance. Couple that with Motorola sucking wind and a major memory design flaw/feature on an embedded processor (I gave up at the 7447) and it was doomed.

PPC developers rarely hit the metal directly,

Could not be less true. People liked the PPC because you could get to assembly easily and it was not difficult to squeeze 90% performance out of it. The programming strategy was so easy compared to other options at the time.

The problem IBM has is that it creates these alliances so it can go through alliance customer lists and get introductions to decision makers. I fear for NVidia and Tyan because they are going to lose business and customer confidence. Once IBM is in the customer's room they will uninvite the alliance members and divide a sale. I've seen it first hand.

Re:A Little Late?

[Carewolf]

POWER has been been 64bit and massively out-of-order superscalar for years where ARM is only just beginning to enter the market. Simply put POWER is not in the same market as ARM, but in the same market as x86. Which means it is Intel (and AMD) who is killing them.

Re:A Little Late?

[mlts]

POWER7 has some nice advantages over x86/amd64:

1: A feature (mainly for database licensing) to turn off half the cores, let the cores working use the cache on the cores turned off, and crank the clock speed up. Performance in that mode is almost the same as turning on all cores, but these results can vary on what is bring run.

2: Decent bang per watt.

3: A different CPU architecture with a different set of bugs. This helps for secure applications, so if there might be a F0 0F-like bug lurking around, the bad guys would have to find it for IBM's architecture.

4: More registers to use and abuse.

5: Very good virtualization capability. Every POWER7 box thrown out is made from the ground up with a hypervisor built into both FSPs. One can just use a single machine with access to all hardware, or add VIO servers [1] and LPAR it out.

[1]: VIO servers are small AIX [2] instances that pass disk I/O and networking through to the other VMs. On VMWare ESXi, they would be roughly equivalent to a VM appliance that does routing between virtual switches.

[2]: More of a variant of AIX, called IOS... however, oem_setup_env gives you a root prompt if needed.

Nvidia...

[MachineShedFred]

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.

Re:Let's crowdsource and make a PowerBerryPy

[arth1]

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.

Power Licensed

[LoRdTAW]

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.

WRONG!

[Funk_dat69]

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