IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing 131
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).
Re:A Little Late? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.