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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. But 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.

Big Blue is also moving the OpenPower Foundation, which it formed with Google, Mellanox Technologies, Nvidia, and Tyan to help create an ecosystem around the Power architecture six years ago this month, under the administrative control of the Linux Foundation. [...]

In any event, if you have ever wanted to create your own Power processor and was lamenting how expensive it might be to license the technology from IBM, now is your chance.

IBM’s long journey to opening up the Power architecture began a long time ago, starting with the creation of the PowerPC Alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola back in 1991, just as Big Blue was starting to get serious about the Power architecture for RS/6000 Unix systems – Unix was all the rage then, and Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard were circling IBM’s proprietary mainframes and minicomputers like starving wolves, with a very lean and hungry Oracle snarling nearby. Behind the scenes, IBM was preparing to move its proprietary AS/400 enterprise systems to a common hardware platform with the RS/6000, a credible Windows Servers was years away (and would very briefly run on Power iron), and a young Linus Torvalds had just created the first Linux kernel (which would eventually be the key to keeping Power iron alive in HPC centers in particular and in some enterprise datacenters).

The history is long and complex, but suffice it to say that Motorola and IBM both had their challenges bringing server-class processors to market and the move to 64-bits was particularly difficult. Interestingly, it was IBM’s AS/400 processor team in Rochester, Minnesota which saved the day by creating a very good 64-bit PowerPC chip that also had a double-pumped vector processor embedded in it, and it is this processor, not the ones designed by the AIX people down in Austin, that is the very kernel of all Power chips and systems that have followed since. Eventually Sun Microsystems went up on the rocks with its UltraSparc-III systems, and Hewlett Packard and Intel created Itanium, which had its own litany of woes, and this left the door wide open for IBM to be a spoiler in the early 2000s. And it was just then, back in 2001, when IBM got its first dual-core chip and its first processor to clock above 1 GHz out the door – that would be the Power4 “GigaProcessor” – and IBM brought the hammer down in Unix, delivering twice the bang for the buck as Sun and HP did in Unix, eating market share like crazy.

At the same time all of this was going on, the Motorola 68000 series of chips, which were at the heart of Apple PCs as well as myriad kinds and untold millions of embedded controllers. Arm may rule in controllers today, but back then its was Motorola 68Ks, and the kind of unified processor architecture spanning from embedded devices to datacenter gear was first done – and actually realized – with the PowerPC architecture.

Of course, since then, the Unix market has been largely replaced by X86 systems running Linux and Windows Server, and Sparc from Sun and PA-RISC from HP, and Itanium from Intel are all dead. Motorola has ceded the embedded controller market to Arm, and IBM has been trying to breathe some life into Power, first through the Power.org in 2004 and the OpenPower Foundation in 2013. With each move, IBM has opened up its technology a little more and broadened its appeal. It is a question as to whether this will be enough, with an ascending AMD providing an alternative to Intel processors and the Arm collective fielding many good processors, all using Arm licenses and many adding their own special tweaks to the Arm designs while not violating the Arm architecture.

No one is saying that the OpenPower Foundation will have an easy time growing its ecosystem, despite the many architectural advantages that Power holds over other ISAs, but it now has an easier time than a more closed architecture has. It doesn’t hurt that the Power ISA is being given away royalty free, either.

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

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