IBM announces Power processor architecture

IBM company announced about moving the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to the category of open. In 2013, IBM already established the OpenPOWER consortium, whereby it provided the opportunity to license POWER-related intellectual property and provided full access to the specifications. At the same time, fees continued to be collected for obtaining a license for the production of chips. From now on, creating your own modifications of chips based on the Power instruction set architecture will become publicly available and does not require royalties. This includes the right to use all IBM Power-related patents free of charge, and the transfer of project management to the community, which is now
will be involved in decision-making processes.

The OpenPOWER Foundation, which oversees development, will translated under the wing of the Linux Foundation, which will create an independent platform for further joint development of the Power architecture, without being tied to a specific manufacturer. To the OpenPOWER consortium already joined over 350 companies. More than 3 million lines of code for system firmware, specifications, and schematics needed to create Power-compatible chips have been donated to the community.

In addition to moving the instruction set architecture components to Open Hardware, IBM has donated to the community some related technologies used in Power9 chips, including a software implementation (softcore) of the POWER ISA, as well as a reference design for developing extensions based on interfaces. OpenCAPI (Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) and OMI (Open Memory Interface). The provided software implementation allows you to simulate the operation of the reference processor using the Xilinx FPGA.

OpenCAPI technology will make it possible to achieve maximum performance and get rid of bottlenecks when organizing interaction between processor cores and integrated devices, such as GPUs, ASICs, various hardware accelerators, network chips and data storage controllers. OMI will speed up the bandwidth of memory controllers and reduce the resulting delays. For example, thanks to these additions based on Power, it will be possible to create specialized chips optimized for solving problems of artificial intelligence and high-performance data analysis in memory.

Compared to already available open architectures MIPS и RISC-V, the Power architecture is primarily attractive for its readiness to create modern server systems, industrial platforms and clusters. For example, IBM's collaboration with NVIDIA and Mellanox launched two of the world's largest clusters based on the Power architecture, leading ranking Top500 supercomputers.

Source: opennet.ru