Comments on: OpenPower Puts Open Source Software Guru In Charge

By: Timothy Prickett Morgan

Timothy Prickett Morgan — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 16:20:53 +0000

In reply to T Thurlow.

Yes. And we wrote that up on the day it was announced as well.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/06/30/big-blue-open-sources-the-core-inside-bluegene-q-supercomputers/

By: T Thurlow

T Thurlow — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 13:37:30 +0000

In reply to T Thurlow.

Since this article was written IBM has open sourced the Power-A2 core, which was developed around 2010.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/06/30/big-blue-open-sources-the-core-inside-bluegene-q-supercomputers/

By: Timothy Prickett Morgan

Timothy Prickett Morgan — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 14:10:05 +0000

In reply to hoohoo. First, thanks for the catch. Second, you are under the mistaken impression we work for El Reg. We do not. Situation Publishing does our advertising and lead gen sales, and some back office stuff. But we are an independent company and an independent publication. And have been since day one. We lean on ourselves, and do the best we can under these weird circumstances. We hope you are doing the same.

By: hoohoo

hoohoo — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 02:49:17 +0000

Guys I know El Reg is leaning on you to put out more stories, but come on. You have a glaring typo in the very first sentence of the story. You have to read your proofs, not just scan quickly and spell check.

If I do not see improvements here I will have to report you to the Register Pedant un Chief, and the Register grammar nazis.

By: T Thurlow

T Thurlow — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 14:41:26 +0000

Power did a lot of damage to itself in the early 2000’s when:

Freescale ( Mototola ) brought out the g4 Power PC chip around 2000,
and never developed a new, much more powerful, Power PC chip after that.

Apple bought a Power chip company and converted it to making ARM chips,
killing off the power chips that company made.

Apple stopped using Power or Power PC chips in it’s MAC OS PC’s in the early
2000’s.

IBM killed off a 10 watt – 15 watt dual core g5 Power chip it had designed
for Apple. IBM should have sold the rights to it’s g5 10-15 watt chip.

Had IBM decided to opensource Power in 2007, Power would be in much better
shape today.

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 01:45:22 +0000

“If you want to build a successful hardware ecosystem around a chip architecture that has recently been open sourced, as the Power chip instruction set was last August, then it probably makes a lot of sense to put someone at the help of the project who has deep and broad experience participating in the open source software ecosystem” is a great opening sentence, but did you type it using gesture input from a mobile phone?

I keep hoping the IBM Power ISA competes with x86, but it looks like ARM has lots more momentum.