IBM and Freescale are pushing Power.org further out into the open, unifying both IBM’s and Freescale’s instruction sets into a single architecture and adding new members who can help in furthering the platform.

Two of those new members notably are from research organizations in China, where the two companies hope Power will fare well—particularly when it is coupled with Linux and other open-source software. One is the Ministry of Information Industry’s Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion Center, whose stated goal is to expand the market beyond China’s borders. The other is Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of China’s premier research institutions.

IBM has been preparing for this push into China for months. The company opened its first Power Application Center in Shanghai two weeks ago. The center offers developers tools and IBM on-site expertise in developing Power-based solutions.

“What we’ve done is installed and implemented a governance process,” said Carlos Gutierrez, chief of staff for Freescale’s networking and computing systems group. “This will give to the market a single, seamless architecture.”

IBM and Motorola jointly began developing the Power architecture, in conjunction with Apple, back in 1989. IBM’s efforts focused largely on servers and workstations, while Motorola—and later its spinoff, Freescale—focused on embedding Power into networking and communications. The combination of the two worlds is indicative of the growing convergence trend in both markets rather than a cutback in development dollars, both companies say. Both IBM and Freescale note that their development funds will not decrease with the combination.

The new architecture will be binary compatible with previous versions from each company. While that means software will run on both versions, existing applications will have to be recompiled to take advantage of all the features. Of particular interest for each company is IBM’s virtualization technology and Freescale’s variable length encoding, which allows software instructions to be packed more tightly.

“This now addresses everything from high performance computing to gaming and consumer electronics,” said Bill Dykas, manager of Power ecosystem development for IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions. “By doing this, we’ve lowered the barriers of entry for new companies.”

Also on the list of new members are EVE, which makes hardware-assisted verification technology; Oki Data Americas, which makes computer peripherals; and CodeSourcery, an open-source services company.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved