IBM announced that I decided to open the architecture from the instruction set of your POWER Command Set processor family (ISA), one of which, the IBM POWER 9, is used in one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world: the Summit supercomputer.
In 2013, IBM established the OpenPOWER Consortium, which provided the opportunity to license POWER-related intellectual property and gave it full access to the specifications. At the same time, deductions continued to be collected to obtain a chip manufacturing license.
Hereinafter, creating your own chip modifications based on the instruction set architecture of Power will be publicly available and will require no deductions. This includes the right to free use of all IBM-related Power patents, and project management is transferred to the community, which will now be involved in the decision-making processes.
The announcement came through several official channels of the company, including the OpenPower Foundation, an organization created by IBM 6 years ago to encourage adoption of the chip family.
"With IBM's announcement of new contributions to the open source community, including the instructional architecture architecture of the POWER family of processors and key hardware design models for OpenPower Summit." North America 2019, the future has never been brighter for POWER architecture, ”the company writes. The POWER family of processors includes PowerPC, RS / 6000, POWER 1, 2, 4, 4+, 5, 5+, 6, 7, 8, 9, IBM 360, and IBM system z. These are RISC processors.
To be precise about what IBM does, it must be said that the company, through the OpenPower Foundation, establishes the instruction set architecture of the POWER family of processors available to businesses and individuals to use without having to pay license fees or royalties.
In addition, will have patent rights on the implemented chips based on the architecture instruction set now open. However, businesses and individuals will need to align themselves with a stack of compatibility requirements.
This is one of the reasons why the OpenPower Foundation will be under the administrative control of the Linux Foundation.
The maneuver will ensure that each of the proposed changes to the instruction set architecture is subject to a majority vote to ensure compliance with these requirements. According to comments from IBM officials, the approach is intended to limit fragmentation.
IBM has made additional communications in addition to the opening of the POWER processor family instruction set architecture and the passing of the OpenPower Foundation under the control of the Linux Foundation.
First, the company announces the availability of an open source architecture architecture design model to implement within FPGA chips.
This is the result of the work of an IBM engineer who relied on the architecture of the POWER family instruction set to build a softcore on a Xilinx FPGA.
"This is the first tangible result of the openness of the instruction set architecture," said the president of the OpenPower Foundation. Its use should broaden the horizons of developers, especially with regard to configuring custom instruction sets.
Also, the company has published a set of additional resources designed to reduce the learning curve.
Hence, we found a reference guide for including instruction set architecture within custom processors.
In addition, IBM provides OpenCAPI (for use with FPGAs) and open memory interface OpenCAPI technology design models (IMO) for the community.
In addition, the company intends to show the way to the third party who wants to rely on its resources to configure its own accelerators and memory interface devices.
The openness of this instruction set architecture is IBM's latest contribution to the open source field after the $ 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat.
Source: https://openpowerfoundation.org