OpenPOWER Foundation – Open-Source / Open Hardware PowerPC CPU ISA

Re:OpenPOWER Foundation – Open-Source / Open Hardware PowerP... by adrian_b on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @12:43PM (#44108572)

After Motorola has abandoned totally (MC88k, M.core) or partially (MC68k => Coldfire) its older ISAs and it has transitioned to using the POWER/PowerPC ISA, it has applied it to the market in which they was interested, designing many kinds of microcontrollers with it, mainly for the automotive and communications markets, where microcontrollers with higher performance were required. Around the same time IBM has also introduced a series of microcontrollers based on the POWER ISA (PowerPC 4xx).

However, when the POWER ISA has initially been designed, before its launch in 1990, its target were high-end scientific workstations and servers made by IBM. The idea of using it in embedded computers has come much later, when the increased density achievable in integrated circuits has made that possible.

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Re:OpenPOWER Foundation – Open-Source / Open Hardware PowerP... by dragontamer on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @05:32PM (#44110834)

Sure. But the embedded PowerQUICC chips were in use between the years 199x and 201x, and are still manufactured today in 2025.

My overall point is that Power ISA has a long history as both high performance compute AND embedded (be it industrial, automotive, or space embedded).

Maybe in the late 1980s POWER was high performance only. But there's a big history here and it's weird to see this discussion ignore Power ISA's long embedded history.

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Does OpenPower have a chance today? I dunno. Obviously the hype is in RISC-V and maybe a bit of ARM. But it's not a bad ISA and Power used to target embedded not very long ago

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