IBM is looking to increase the size of the ecosystem surrounding POWER processors by for the first time making the instruction sets for those processors available royalty-free as part of a move to bring future research and development for the platform under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
An OpenPOWER Foundation that was created in 2013 by IBM, Red Hat, NVIDIA, and Mellanox is now an arm of the Linux Foundation. There are now 350 members of the OpenPower Foundation.
By making available the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) available royalty-free, the number of organizations participating in the OpenPOWER Foundation should significantly increase, says Ken King, general manager for OpenPOWER at IBM.
“We saw an opportunity to go more open,” says King.
IBM is also contributing a softcore implementation of the POWER ISA, as well as reference designs for the Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI) and the Open Memory Interface (OMI). The OpenCAPI and OMI technologies maximize memory bandwidth between any processor and attached devices.
IBM and the other members of the OpenPOWER Foundation are also committed to making available additional reference designs that will make it easier for organizations to build custom systems, says King. IBM has already contributed more than two million lines of open source system firmware and system reference designs and associated documentation.
Builders of custom systems will be given the option of either building systems on their own or contributing extensions to the POWER architecture that will need to be approved within the context of a governing body administered by the Linux Foundation.
POWER processors are critical to IBM because platforms such as IBM Watson depend in part on them to process deep and machine learning algorithms efficiently. As such, IBM has a vested interest in lowering the going cost of building POWER processors.
It’s not clear to what degree making POWER ISA available royalty-free will advance that goal. However, at a time when systems employing multiple classes of processors are becoming more common, interest in POWER processors that have already been shown how they can process advanced algorithms efficiently is likely to draw a lot more attention across the white box community.
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