Big Blue Open Sources Power Chip Instruction Set

https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/20/big-blue-open-sources-power-chip-instruction-set/

With a big injection of open source spirit from its acquisition of Red Hat, IBM is finally taking the next step and open sourcing the instruction set architecture of its Power family of processors.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/open-source-power-isa-takes-aim-at-intel-and-arm-for-accelerator-driven-computing/
IBM announced the release of the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA) as an open standard at the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego on Tuesday.
IBM’s long journey to opening up the Power architecture began a long time ago.
Power ISA has now opened. Now, the POWER ISA is available royalty-free, inclusive of patent rights.

Let’s see what kind of uptake it might have against RISC-V and Arm and a closed X86 architecture from AMD and Intel.

5 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    IBM’s Power-ful open source gift: China wins big, and these are the losers
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibms-power-ful-open-source-gift-big-winner-is-china-losers-include-you-know-who/

    It’s a heck of an announcement by Big Blue, and this is a heck of a list

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    OpenPOWER Foundation Trumpets Fully Open 64-bit Microwatt POWER Core
    https://www.hackster.io/news/openpower-foundation-trumpets-fully-open-64-bit-microwatt-power-core-f54c5d5ad295

    OpenPOWER Foundation executive director Hugh Blemings has officially launched the Microwatt soft-core processor, a 64-bit POWER design written in the VHDL hardware description language and released under a permissive licence — a first for the organisation and the POWER instruction set architecture.

    Following the growing success of free and open source silicon efforts, in particular RISC-V, OpenPOWER made the move to release the POWER architecture — originally created by the Apple, IBM, and Motorola triumvirate known as AIM — under a permissive licence, finally living up to the “open” part of OpenPOWER.

    Reply

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