POWER is not a typo, and it is not a emphasis, this is the trademark from IBM, the thing is really named POWER in all caps.

I have a bit more sympathy for IBM since they weren't exactly going for viral adoption and (seriously) their products have a long tradition of being lowercase-challenged.

So why did you write IBM, instead of Ibm? Or ARM, instead of Arm?

The contrivedness of an acronym increases exponentially with its length.

EDIT: OK, I give in. I had too much fun hanging out with the password cracking guys at the awesome Passwords 13 conference last week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_Instruction_Set_Archi...

It will be interesting to see if the New York Times refers to it as "I.B.M.'s P.O.W.E.R. technology."

Shouldn't we call out particularly egregious bits of language engineering when we see them?

Glad they are trying again, not sure if they will be any more successful this time, but will be pleasantly surprised if we get a credible third horse in the 'mass market instruction set architecture' race.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platf...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PReP

"The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions."

ADDED: the elReg article in this item, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168144, based on talking to an IBM guy, implies it is that level of BIOS/chipset firmware that's being talking about. Ah well.

Translation: There is no way that this hardware is going to end up being affordable for small time builders, hackers, and enthusiasts. Unless someone screws up and accidentally ships something like a Playstation 3 rev 1 using it.

I'm only cynical because I'm jealous.

And that means in Low Power segment ARM realm supreme. Not likely to be dethrone in the next coming decade. As they have solid roadmap and pretty much the plan for next few years are all set and done.

So where does it left for Power? Coming from IBM they are very likely to be expensive. IBM has never been known to iterate as fast as Intel. Let alone ARM which now offers all sort of ARM chips for everything except High performance in their portfolio.

I just dont see how this could change anything.

In the past, the supercomputers/clusters sold by IBM do not include hardware from these other companies. I think this partnership with Tyan (major manufacturer of current x86 chipsets) will also allow 3rd-party vendors to build systems with IBM POWER processors.

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have its own niche in the market.

[1] http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have its own niche in the market.

Look at that Top500 list again and compare #1 (x86) and #3 (POWER). #1 has about double the number of cores, performance and power usage. I'd say the high-end Xeons are comparable to POWER in all aspects.

Here's a picture of the Sequoia machine: http://imgur.com/6UrZndM

Each of those cards is a single node in the cluster.

[1] http://www.green500.org/lists/green201306&green500from=1&gre...

I always considered POWER much more cool than x86, and was pretty sad when Apple abandoned it.

Also I was happy the current gen consoles used it, but I think Sony move to make it bizarrely complex to the point that noone could code for it, kinda stupid.

I know people have put the OpenSPARC code on FPGAs, but I don't know of any use in industry in FPGAs or ASICS. I'd be interested if anybody knows any.

imagine a PowerPC HPC SOC for less than $99 :)

There are/were plenty of PowerPC-based microcontrollers. Freescale, among other vendors, had a few families. It's all ARM now though as far as I know.