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IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing

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  • #11
    Originally posted by hajj_3 View Post
    interesting decision. ARM are going to take quite a chunk of the server cpu market over the coming years, ibm won't be in the new gen of consoles except the wii u so ibm's sales of cpu's are going to wear away over time. I hope Nvidia makes their own desktop/laptop SoC using power+nvidia gpu and the rest that goes into a soc. They could sell chips for desktops and laptops running linux/chrome os for a fairly low price yet the performance will be great.

    Does anyone know what the power comsumption levels are on modern ibm architectures? Could they create an apu with the power of an intel core i3 using say 35w? It is a shame windows doesn't support power architecture otherwise we could have a proper competitor to intel and amd.
    The most eficient supercomputers are the BlueGen (uses powerpc), way better than x86. Beside that power is a very mature architecture; in power7 there's 4 threads in each physical core. Another advantage is that power has much higher performance in calculations than x86.
    I think that power is cheaper to produce; you need way less transistors and we all know that x86 now is a mess.

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    • #12
      Ive read these guerilla marketeers claims but im still sceptical. Can anyone back up Power superiority up with some cold hard benchmarks or links?

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      • #13
        Is PowerPC development to expensive for IBM ?

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        • #14
          An Amiga on POWER8?

          Just saying... how cool would a new Amiga be on a POWER8. Granted OS4.x really needs to get some SMP working among some other features, but that would be pretty awesome.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Yuma View Post
            The ISA has been open for license for years; you can get a license and then build your own processor from the ground up. What they're doing here is offering their designs for licensing, i.e. you can get their POWER8 design and use it to build your own silicon. I'm sure it won't be cheap.
            Oh that's sweet!
            Really nice, it dramatically cuts down costs.

            Though, they should have done this a decade or two ago, then maybe POWER would have gotten foothold and more market share, now it is a bit late. Better late than never though.

            By the way, Sun Microsystems did this years ago with the OpenSPARC project for the UltraSPARC T1 and T2. Unfortunately Oracle discontinued this practice with the T3.

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            • #16
              This has so much potential. Looking forward to the new hw.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by leech View Post
                Just saying... how cool would a new Amiga be on a POWER8. Granted OS4.x really needs to get some SMP working among some other features, but that would be pretty awesome.
                Not very. What use is a "new Amiga"?

                I used to have an old Amiga, back in the day. They were nice machines for gaming, at the time. Nice for demoes and music, as well. Not much good for anything else. Oh there were those enthusiasts who just SWORE that you could do everything with Amiga, and even BETTER than you could with macs or pc's - no matter that even the top-end models were getting sorely left behind by the latest PC's, but you see, there's some magic circuitry inside the Amiga that allows it to still run faster even with slower hardware... yeah right.

                I'd pay for an old Amiga, if only for the nostalgia value. A new one I wouldn't have any use for. The day of manufacturer-specific platforms is long gone, unless your name is Apple.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by leech View Post
                  Just saying... how cool would a new Amiga be on a POWER8. Granted OS4.x really needs to get some SMP working among some other features, but that would be pretty awesome.
                  Is there even any software for Amiga that would even see any real benefit from such a beast? I can't imagine there being much in the way of modern video or 3D modeling software for it to actually stretch it's legs.

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                  • #19
                    Doesn't Freescale manufacture CPUs with POWER cores licensed from IBM?

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by dee. View Post
                      Not very. What use is a "new Amiga"?

                      I used to have an old Amiga, back in the day. They were nice machines for gaming, at the time. Nice for demoes and music, as well. Not much good for anything else.
                      Amigas were widely used in video production back in the time, for example for science fiction shows like Babylon 5, seaQuest DSV and Max Headroom. They were also widely used by graphics artists like Andy Warhol.

                      Saying that they weren't good for anything but gaming and demos/music is showing nothing but a lack of knowledge about these nice machines.

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