Power.org gains traction, new members

By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- Electronic News, 4/4/2007

Power.org, once synonymous with the PowerPC chip created by IBM, is evolving into an ecosystem that closely parallels Big Blue’s philosophy that more partners equals more traction in all parts of the processor market.

POWER—the acronym for a processor first developed by IBM, Motorola and Apple back in 1991 (it stood for performance optimized with enhanced RISC)—has been open to the industry for several years. In the past couple of years, in particular, industry interest in Power.org has been growing.

At least part of that growth is due to the fact that the group, which is still spearheaded by IBM and Freescale, the chip division spinout from Motorola, has been actively recruiting from across the electronics industry. Part of it also is due to the rising complexity of and cost of processor development, which makes the Power.org specification increasingly attractive to companies that want a quick entry into a market with minimal up-front costs.

“We’ve seen new levels of interest recently,” said Jesse Stein, IBM’s strategic marketing manager for PowerPC products. “The first year we were hardware and chip focused. Now, there’s more of a solutions approach with more software expertise coming in.”

The list of new members includes Wind River, VaST, XGI (Taiwan), as well as driver manufacturers and board-level developers. Stein said there are other members about to sign on, as well.

Glenn Beck, industrial/storage market segment manager at Freescale, said the Power architecture is beginning to make inroads against established players such as MIPS and ARM in the embedded world. He said the real advantage of the Power architecture is that it spans everything from low-end systems to supercomputers.

Microsoft used a PowerPC chip developed by IBM in its Xbox 360, and Nintendo used a version in its Wii. Variations of that architecture also have appeared in the eight-core Cell processor, which powers supercomputers and the Sony Playstation 3 (which only uses seven of the eight cores).