POWER ISA Contributed To Open-Source, OpenPOWER Joining The Linux Foundation

The big POWER announcement appears to be that the POWER instruction set architecture is being contributed to the open-source community and the OpenPOWER Foundation is becoming part of the Linux Foundation.

The POWER ISA is being moved to an open model and with IBM contributing a POWER ISA license to the OpenPOWER Foundation, technically anyone can implement on top of it royalty-free and with patent rights. This comes following the success of the royalty-free RISC-V and even the MIPS processor ISA being open-sourced.

IBM also announced, "In addition to open sourcing the POWER ISA, IBM is also contributing a newly developed softcore to the community. In a very short time, an IBM engineer was able to develop a softcore on the POWER ISA, and get it up and running on a Xilinx FPGA. This softcore implementation is being demonstrated this week at OpenPOWER Summit North America."

More details via the OpenPOWER Foundation blog.