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IBM announced plans to provide free access for researchers and
educational institutions to the specifications for its PowerPC 405 chip
core. The move is yet one more way in which IBM is trying to widen the
number of users of its Power processors. The hope is that allowing
third parties to experiment with the PowerPC chip core will result in
more innovation around the technology.
Cores are individual chip designs that developers can integrate with other designs to create custom chips.
IBM announced plans to provide free access for researchers and
educational institutions to the specifications for its PowerPC 405 chip
core. The move is yet one more way in which IBM is trying to widen the
number of users of its Power processors. The hope is that allowing
third parties to experiment with the PowerPC chip core will result in
more innovation around the technology.
Cores are individual chip designs that developers can integrate with other designs to create custom chips.
The announcement comes after academics engaged in collaborative
multicore processing research approached IBM to request more access to
its Power architecture, the vendor said in a release issued late
Wednesday.
The researchers included the Research Accelerator for Multiple
Processors (RAMP), a project headed up by the University of California,
Berkeley; Stanford University; MIT; Carnegie Mellon University; the
University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Washington. Its
aim is to build a scalable, multiboard system based on
field-programmable gate arrays so researchers can experiment with
building, programming and managing massively parallel systems of 64 to
1,024 processors.
IBM plans to make the PowerPC 405 specifications available to
researchers and academics via Power.org, the vendor consortium it set
up just over a year ago.
Power.org's mission is to promote the Power architecture. Its
members include Cadence Design Systems Inc., Chartered Semiconductor
Manufacturing Ltd., Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc. IBM is positioning the
Power architecture as suitable for all systems, from handheld devices
up to supercomputers, and has been licensing the technology to third
parties.
Last week, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced its intention to publish
the specifications for its new UltraSparc T1 chip under a program
called OpenSparc. Sun positions its UltraSparc-based servers against
IBM's Power5+-based servers.
Read the original article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=107104
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