IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches

Over the past year IBM engineers have been plumbing "future" processor support into the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components. The patches often referred to the work either as "future" or "powerxx" while today is christened as what was pretty much obvious all along: it's POWER10.

POWER10 has been known from disclosures as the next-generation IBM/OpenPOWER ISA with expected availability in 2021. POWER10 has been rumored to be manufactured on a 7nm process and offer big improvements over existing POWER9 processors.

IBM has published its POWER ISA 3.1 specification and thus now letting their engineers officially acknowledge their compiler contributions as POWER10 as of today.

Thus a number of GNU toolchain patches were merged this morning as "we can finish with the powerxx silliness," as said by one of the developers. The patches are renaming all of their bits from "powerxx" to POWER10.

It will be interesting to see in due course how well IBM POWER10 can compete with the likes of Intel Cascade Lake / Ice Lake Xeons and AMD EPYC Rome/Milan... At least IBM as usual is getting its open-source/Linux support well in order ahead of launch.