Framing It: 8.26.19
Now You’re Playing With POWER
Because the future of silicon is Open Source, IBM has opened up their POWER architecture and move everything from the OpenPOWER foundation to the Linux foundation. Now anyone (especially if you have a billion dollar chip fab in your backyard) can develop new CPUs with an instruction set that isn’t ARM or x86.
This is a huge change to the POWER architecture. Previously, anyone could license the instruction set and build their own silicon. That cost money. Now, the license is Open Source, and free, as in speech, and as in beer. Anyone can make their own POWER CPU, and all it will cost is an FPGA development board.
What Is Power?
The POWER architecture began as an IBM research project in 1975 to develop a RISC CPU. RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer, is the idea that a CPU can use fewer clock cycles per instruction, even though there aren’t as many instructions in total.
Today, nearly every CPU except for those coming from Intel and AMD are RISC processors in name (ARM has JavaScript somehow in the CPU, though).
Beginning in the 1990s, Apple and Motorola glommed onto IBM’s POWER project and created the PowerPC as an alternative to it’s unsuccessful 88000 CPU. This led to PowerPC Macs up until the introduction of Intel-based Macs in the mid-nineties. POWER chips were found in the Nintendo GameCube, Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360, and in the Cell processors of Sony’s PS3. A number of the TOP500 supercomputers were, at one time, built on POWER CPUs.
A New Open Source CPU
News of the POWER architecture moving to the Linux foundation doesn’t mean this is the first Open Source CPU. In 2010, UC Berkeley began the RISC-V project, an Open Source hardware Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). It’s still a RISC architecture, but it’s not a chip; it’s simply a design for a chip that can be implemented in an FPGA or on silicon.
Many companies have picked up on the RISC-V architecture, and SiFive has produced real working silicon in the form of microcontrollers. There are some other boards in SiFive’s lineup, including one that’s capable of running Linux. That’s just a development board, and no one is crazy enough to build an entire server out of one (except one guy, and that was a bit excessive).
But with Western Digital, Nvidia, and other companies looking at putting RISC-V in their products, it was only a matter of time until the holders of other ISAs took up the Open Source model. Next up, Sparc?
