Power Architecture - History

History

Power Architecture began its life at IBM in the late 1980s when the company wanted a high-performance RISC architecture for their mid-range workstations and servers. The result was the "POWER architecture." Its first implementation was featured in the RS/6000 computers introduced in 1990. This was the 10-chip RIOS-1 processor, later called POWER1. The RISC Single Chip (RSC) processor was developed from RIOS-1.

In 1992, Apple, IBM and Motorola formed the AIM alliance to develop a mass market version of the POWER processor. The result of this was the "PowerPC architecture", a modified version of the POWER architecture. The first PowerPC implementation was the PowerPC 601 in 1993. It was based heavily on RSC and found its way into Apple's Power Mac computers as well as IBM RS/6000 systems. The differences between the POWER instruction set and PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02.

IBM expanded their POWER architecture for their RS/6000 systems which resulted in the eight-chip POWER2 processor in 1993 and a single chip version called P2SC, "POWER2 Super Chip", in 1996.

In the early 1990s IBM sought to replace the CISC based AS/400 minicomputers with a RISC architecture. This new architecture's development code name was "Amazon" and came to be referred to as the PowerPC-AS ("Advanced Series" or "Amazon Series") amongst engineers working on the project. PowerPC-AS was to be a multi-processor server platform based on RSC. As development continued at IBM Research labs to extend RSC to support a 64-processor inter-connect and add features specific to AS/400, RS/6000 developers joined in and added some POWER2 features. It all ended up in the 64-bit A10 and A30 processors introduced in 1995 and the later RS64 line in 1997, used in AS/400 and RS/6000 systems.

The AIM Alliance continued to develop PowerPC from 1995 through 1997 and released the second generation PowerPC processors: The PowerPC 602 for set top boxes and game consoles; the PowerPC 603 geared towards the embedded market and portable computers; the PowerPC 604 for workstations; and PowerPC 620, a 64-bit high-performance processor for servers. The 602 and 620 never found widespread use but the 603, 604 and their successors became very popular in their respective fields. Motorola and IBM also made the "Book E" extension of PowerPC, used in embedded implementations: Motorola's PowerQUICC processors and IBM's PowerPC 400 family.

The last effort of the AIM Alliance was the third generation PowerPC 750 in 1997. Motorola and IBM went their separate ways in developing the PowerPC architecture after that. The "G3" processors found widespread use in both computer and embedded markets and IBM kept evolving the 750 family in the years to come. Motorola, however, chose to focus on the embedded market with PowerPC SoC designs and the PowerPC 7400, which they called the fourth generation PowerPC. This processor incorporated Altivec, a SIMD unit. The "PowerPC G4" came in 1999 and was used by Apple in workstations and laptops and by various companies in the telecom market.

In 1998 came POWER3 which unified the PowerPC and POWER2 architectures but was only used in IBM's RS/6000 servers.

2000 saw the last implementation of the PowerPC-AS architecture, the RS64-IV, used in AS/400 and RS/6000, now renamed eServer iSeries and eServer pSeries respectively. IBM also produced the Gekko processor for use in Nintendo's GameCube game console. It's based on the PowerPC 750CXe. IBM built the Rivina, experimental 64-bit PowerPC processor, which became the first microprocessor to surpass the 1 GHz mark.

In 2001 IBM introduced the POWER4 which unified and replaced the PowerPC-AS and POWER3 architectures.

In 2002 Apple desperately needed a new high-end PowerPC part and got IBM to make the 64-bit PowerPC 970. Apple described it as the fifth generation PowerPC or "G5". The PowerPC 970 is derived from POWER4. It lacks some server oriented features, but does have an AltiVec unit. The 970 and its descendants are used by Apple and IBM and some high-end embedded applications.

In 2003, Tundra bought the PowerPC 100 family of microcontrollers from Motorola, while Culturecom licensed PowerPC technology from IBM for their V-Dragon processor.

Motorola spun off its semiconductor division into a new company called Freescale Semiconductor in 2004, while POWER5 from IBM was introduced, an evolution from POWER4. It bumped the PowerPC specification to v.2.01, and again to v.2.02 in 2005 with the POWER5+. AMCC during 2004 licensed IP and staff from IBM concerning the PowerPC 400 family. Motorola/Freescale renamed its PowerPC families to e200, e300, e500 and e600 and announced the future 64-bit e700. Power.org was founded the same year, by IBM alongside 15 other companies, as an organization whose mission is to develop products revolving around the Power Architecture. Its purpose is to develop, enable and promote Power Architecture technology.

2005 saw the specifications of the Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba over a four-year period. Its primary use is for Sony's PlayStation 3. Cell uses a single 64-bit Power Architecture core, and adds 8 independent SIMD cores called SPEs. IBM also revealed the Xenon processor, a tri-core 64-bit processor for use in Microsoft's Xbox 360. With the 32-bit PowerPC based Broadway processor that Nintendo would use for its Wii console, IBM had put Power Architecture processors in all three of the major seventh generation game consoles.

P.A. Semi licensed Power Architecture technology from IBM for use in its PWRficient processors.

Freescale joined Power.org in 2006 and IBM made the specifications of PowerPC 405 freely available to researchers and academia.

Power.org released the Power ISA version 2.03. in September 2006. All previous PowerPC specifications are compatible with the 64-bit Power ISA. This added, among other things, VMX, virtualization and variable length encoding (VLE, 2-byte instructions added to previously 4-byte instructions) to the specification.

Power.org released the Power Architecture Platform Reference, PAPR, in the fourth quarter of 2006. It provided the foundation for development of Power Architecture based computers using the Linux operating system.

In April 2007, Freescale and IPextreme opened up a licensing program for Freescale's PowerPC e200 core. In May 2007 IBM launched its POWER6 high-end microprocessor at speeds up to 5.0 GHz, doubling the performance of the previous POWER5. The POWER6 added AltiVec to the POWER series and an FPU supporting decimal arithmetic. The same day AMCC announced its Titan high-end embedded processor, reaching 2 GHz while consuming very little power. It uses innovative logic design from Intrinsity and would be available in 2008. The members of Power.org finalized the Power ISA v.2.04 specification in June 2007. Improvements are mainly focused on server applications and virtualization. At the Power Architecture Developer Conference in September 2007, drafts to Power ISA v.2.05 and ePAPR specification were shown, and a Linux based reference design based on PowerPC 970MP was revealed. The Power ISA v.2.05 specification was released in December 2007.

In April 2008, IBM rebranded their Power Architecture based hardware, System p and System i. They are now called "Power Systems". At the same time they rebranded the i5/OS operating system "IBM i". On May 25, 2008, IBM was the first to break the 1 Petaflops barrier with the Roadrunner supercomputer. In June 2008, it entered the Top500 list of the fastest computers in the world on first place, replacing the BlueGene/L which had held that position since November 2004. On June 16, 2008, Freescale announced QorIQ families P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5, the evolution of PowerQUICC, featuring the eight-core P4080.

According to the June 2008 TOP500 list, the third and sixth fastest supercomputers in the world, and 22 of the 50 fastest supercomputers, used IBM's technologies based on Power Architecture. Of the top ten, five used Power Architecture processors as computing elements and one used them as communications processors.

In September 2008, the POWER7-based supercomputer, Blue Waters, got the green light. For a cost of $208 million, it will contain 200,000 processors, bringing multi-petaflops performance in 2010-2011. In December 2008, the ePAPR v.1.0 specification for embedded Power Architecture based computers was finalized.

The Power ISA v.2.06 specification was released in February 2009, and revised in July 2010. Mentor Graphics enables the Android mobile operating system on Freescale's QorIQ and PowerQUICC III platforms in July 2009.

At the ISSCC 2010 conference in February 2010, IBM released the POWER7 processor and revealed the PowerPC A2 "wire-speed processor". Both massively multicore and multithreaded server oriented processors comprising over 1 billion transistors each. In June Freescale announced their first 64-bit core, the e5500, implemented in the QorIQ P5 family processors.

Freescale announced the multithreaded 64-bit e6500 core in June 2011 under the QorIQ AMP brand. It will reintroduce AltiVec SIMD units into Freescale's offerings, and be integrated in multiple products manufactured in a 28 nm process beginning 2012.

At the E3 trade show in June 2011 Nintendo announced the Wii U game console which uses a multicore Power Architecture processor of unknown characteristics, designed and manufactured by IBM