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| Predecessor | Power.org |
|---|---|
| Formation | August 6, 2013; 12 years ago (2013-08-06) |
| Founders | IBM,Google,Mellanox,NVIDIA,Tyan |
| Purpose | Member companies are enabled to create an open ecosystem, using the Power ISA |
| Membership | > 350 members[4] |
Key people |
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Parent organization | Linux Foundation |
| Website | openpowerfoundation |
TheOpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration aroundPower ISA-based products initiated byIBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013.[5] IBM's focus is to open up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as processor specifications, firmware, and software with a liberal license, and will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.[6][7]
The goal is to enable the server vendor ecosystem to build its own customized server, networking, and storage hardware for futuredata centers andcloud computing.[8]
The governing body around thePower ISAinstruction set is now the OpenPOWER Foundation: IBM allows its patents to be royalty-freefor Compliant implementations.[9] Processors based on IBM'sIP can now be fabricated on any foundry and mixed with other hardware products of the integrator's choice.
On August 20, 2019, IBM announced that the OpenPOWER Foundation would become part of theLinux Foundation.[10]
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IBM is using the word "open" to describe this project in three ways:[7]
OpenPower Foundation also releases Documentation on the Power Architecture.[11]
Some relevant documents are thePower ISA andPower Architecture Platform Reference.
 | Parts of this article (those related to technology) need to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(September 2019) |
IBM is looking to offer thePOWER8 chip technology and other future iterations under the OpenPOWER initiative[6] but they are also making previous designs available for licensing.[12] Partners are required to contribute intellectual property to the OpenPOWER Foundation to be able to gain high level status.
The POWER8 processor architecture incorporates facilities to integrate it more easily into custom designs. The generic memory controllers are designed to evolve with future technologies, and the newCAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) expansion bus is built to integrate easily with external coprocessors likeGPUs,ASICs andFPGAs.
Nvidia is contributing their fast interconnect technology,NVLink, that will enable tight coupling of Nvidia'sPascal based graphics processors into future POWER processors.[13]
In August 2019, IBM released the tinyMicrowatt processor core implementing the Power ISA v.3.0 and to be used as a reference design for OpenPOWER. It's entirely open source and published onGitHub.[14] Later,Chiselwatt joined in as a second open source implementation.[15]
In June 2020, IBM released the high performanceA2I core under a similar open source license.[16] and followed up with theA2O core in September 2020.[17]
At the OpenPOWER Summit NA 2020, Libre-SOC was announced as the first Libre/OpenPOWER ISA core outside of IBM. It adhered to thePower ISA 3.0instruction set and could be run onfield-programmable gate array boards.[18] In a list-serv message dated June 23, 2024, project lead, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton described the project as "effectively terminated".[19]
| Parts of this article (those related to technology) need to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(September 2019) |
The OpenPOWER initiative will includefirmware, theKVMhypervisor, andlittle endianLinux operating system.[6] The foundation has a site onGitHub for the software they are releasing as open source. As of July 2014, it has released firmware to boot Linux.[20]
SUSE included support for Power8 in their enterprise Linux distributionSUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 12 (release 27 October 2014).[21]
Canonical Ltd. supports the architecture inUbuntu Server from version 16.04 LTS.[22]
FreeBSD has also been reported to have preliminary support for the architecture.[23][24]
Collabora Online is an enterprise-ready edition of LibreOffice with web-based office suite real-time collaboration, support of the OpenPOWER ppc64le architecture was announced in October 2022.[25] It comes with Ubuntu 20.04 packages and Docker images, and is delivered as a part of Nextcloud Enterprise which specialises in sharing files, writing emails, conducting chats and video conferences.
Google,Tyan,Nvidia, andMellanox are founding members of the OpenPOWER Foundation.[6] Nvidia is looking to merge its graphics cores and Mellanox to integrate its high performance interconnects with Power cores. Tyan is said to be working on servers using POWER8[26] and Google sees usingPower processors in its data centers as a future possibility.[27]Altera announced support for OpenPOWER in November 2013 with theirFPGA offerings andOpenCL software.[28]
On January 19, 2014, the Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company and the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology announced that they will join the OpenPOWER Foundation and license POWER8 technologies to promote and help build systems around and design custom made processors for use inbig data andcloud computing applications.[29][30] On February 12, 2014,Samsung Electronics joined.[31][32] As of March 2014, additional members areAltera,Fusion-io,Hynix,Micron, Servergy, andXilinx. As of April 2014,Canonical, Chuanghe Mobile,Emulex,Hitachi,Inspur,Jülich Research Centre,Oregon State University, Teamsun, Unisource Technology Inc, andZTE are listed as members at various levels.[33] As of December 2014,Rackspace,Avnet,Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,Sandia National Laboratories,Tsinghua University,Nallatech,Bull,QLogic, and Bloombase have joined, totaling about 80 members.[34]
At the first annual OpenPOWER Summit 2015, the organization announced that there were 113 members, includingWistron,Cirrascale, andPMC-Sierra.
As of late 2016, the OpenPOWER foundation has more than 250 members.
As of July 2020, the OpenPOWER Foundation reported that it had 350-plus members.[4]
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