They should have done this 10 years ago. Doing it now just seams like they are a bit late to the party.
sourceWe spend most of our time on x86 and ARM-based CPUs around these parts, but an IBM announcement today aims to add a third name to that list: the company will soon begin offering licenses for its venerable Power architecture to other companies, allowing them to build their own Power chips for "servers, networking, and storage devices."
A few other companies will be helping IBM in these efforts: Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and the Tyan Computer Corp will all apparently be promoting the technology as part of the OpenPower Consortium.
It sill has a pretty good foot hold in supercomputing, flight computer the kind of stuff that has to be super reliable but other then that I don't think its used all that much.
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That, and it has been used extensively in storage and networking controllers up until the latest generation stuff that is moving now towards ARM. Same situation probably in the other sectors with ARM's growing popularity + performance + lower price. Plus Apple moved out of PPC processors which hurt IBM, and even game consoles now moving away. It is not looking good for PowerPC and IBM needs to do something drastic to stay in the game.
Nice info. But the best and fastest PPC procs always cost a bomb. Better they are but cost they aren't. In the end it's down to software support ... If their arch always completely changes and in comes instruction set changes, devs will soon drop them offOriginally Posted by hajile
This offers something very appealing. Everyone seems to know how to make low-power processors, but scaling up is hard. There are already powerPC-based microcontrollers that compete with MIPS or ARM. Unlike ARM though, POWER8 can offer the worlds fastest processor (for those that doubt, the current POWER7+ is more powerful than what Intel and AMD offer). To a company such as Nvidia, this is the chance to get a jump on Intel in the high-performance market while still having low-power competitors (ARM64 is a while off and powerful ARM64 chips are a farther still).
PA Semi (the company bought by Apple), made amazing PowerPC chips back before Apple bought them and moved everything to ARM.
Let's take a look at cost. Let's say that the cost to design your chip is $100,000,000 and the physical manufacturing cost is $100. If you make 100,000 chips (around what IBM probably makes), then each chip carries with it a cost $1100. Now, if you make 10,000,000 chips using that design, then your cost drops to only $110 per chip. This is why Intel and ARM have such an advantage in pricing, but IBM can eat a lot of development costs if they want to make the architecture popular again.
calling BS on that sorry lol. More powerful than AMD maybe but not Intel.Originally Posted by hajile
This offers something very appealing. Everyone seems to know how to make low-power processors, but scaling up is hard. There are already powerPC-based microcontrollers that compete with MIPS or ARM. Unlike ARM though, POWER8 can offer the worlds fastest processor (for those that doubt, the current POWER7+ is more powerful than what Intel and AMD offer).
This. IBM doesn't even rely on their POWER brand. They have a lot of IP and earn billions through many other products and services.