OpenPOWER Foundation
| Company type | Consortium |
|---|---|
| Industry | Technology, Computer hardware |
| Predecessor | OpenPOWER Consortium |
| Founded | August 6, 2013 |
| Headquarters | International |
Area served | Global |
| Products | Power ISA-based processors, firmware, software |
| Owner | IBM (original founder) |
Number of employees | 350+ member organizations (as of 2020) |
| Parent | Linux Foundation (since 2019) |
| Website | openpowerfoundation |
The OpenPOWER Foundation represents a collaborative initiative focused on products based on the Power ISA, originally established by IBM and officially launched as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM’s approach involves making its Power Architecture technology—including processor specifications, firmware, and software—available under a permissive license, encouraging a cooperative development environment with various partners.
The foundation aims to enable server manufacturers to create tailored server, networking, and storage solutions optimized for contemporary data center and cloud computing infrastructures.
As the steward of the Power ISA instruction set, the OpenPOWER Foundation permits the royalty-free utilization of IBM patents for compliant implementations. This policy allows any foundry to produce processors based on IBM's IP and integrate them into diverse hardware systems.
On August 20, 2019, IBM revealed that the OpenPOWER Foundation would become part of the Linux Foundation, broadening its ecosystem influence.
Openness
IBM characterizes "open" within this initiative through three fundamental principles:
- Providing open licensing of microprocessor technologies to collaborators by sharing hardware and software designs necessary for processor and chip fabrication.
- Encouraging an open-collaboration business framework in which members exchange technologies and innovations freely.
- Utilizing benefits from open-source software, including the Linux operating system.
Power Architecture
The OpenPOWER Foundation publishes comprehensive documentation related to the Power Architecture, such as the Power ISA and the Power Architecture Platform Reference, supplying crucial materials for developers and partners.[1]
Hardware
Under the OpenPOWER initiative, IBM provides POWER8 chip technology along with forthcoming versions and also licenses earlier designs. To achieve elevated membership status within the OpenPOWER Foundation, partners are required to contribute intellectual property.
The POWER8 design facilitates straightforward integration into customized systems, featuring flexible memory controllers and the CAPI expansion bus that enables smooth connectivity with external coprocessors such as GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs.
Nvidia contributes its high-speed interconnect technology, NVLink, which allows close integration of Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs with upcoming POWER processors.[2]
Open source
In August 2019, IBM introduced the open source Microwatt processor core implementing Power ISA version 3.0 as a reference design for OpenPOWER, made available on GitHub.[3] This was succeeded by Chiselwatt, a second open source implementation.[4]
In 2020, IBM released both the high-performance A2I core and subsequently the A2O core, under comparable open source licenses.[5]
Libre-SOC is recognized as the third independent implementation of Power ISA v.3.0 and is distinguished as the first Libre/Open POWER ISA core developed externally from IBM.
Software
The OpenPOWER initiative encompasses firmware, the KVM hypervisor, and a little-endian Linux operating system. The foundation manages its open source projects on GitHub and released firmware capable of booting Linux as early as July 2014.
SUSE incorporated support for Power8 processors in its enterprise Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 12, launched in October 2014. Canonical introduced compatibility starting with Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS. Additionally, FreeBSD provides initial architecture support.
In October 2022, Collabora Online, a business-grade version of LibreOffice featuring real-time collaborative editing, announced compatibility with the OpenPOWER ppc64le platform. Offered as part of Nextcloud Enterprise, this release includes Ubuntu 20.04 packages and Docker containers aimed at sectors such as file sharing, email, messaging, and video conferencing.
Members
The OpenPOWER Foundation's founding members comprise Google, Tyan, Nvidia, and Mellanox. Nvidia focuses on integrating its graphics processing units, while Mellanox contributes high-performance interconnect technologies with Power processors. Tyan manufactures servers based on POWER8 architecture, and Google evaluates Power processors for deployment in data center environments.
In November 2013, Altera declared support by offering FPGA solutions and OpenCL software. Early 2014 saw Suzhou PowerCore Technology and Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute join to license POWER8 technologies for applications in big data and cloud computing. Samsung Electronics became a member in February 2014.
By March 2014, the membership expanded to include Altera, Fusion-io, Hynix, Micron, Servergy, and Xilinx. April 2014 additions featured Canonical, Emulex, Hitachi, Inspur, Jülich Research Centre, Oregon State University, Teamsun, Unisource Technology Inc., and ZTE. By December 2014, new members such as Rackspace, Avnet, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Tsinghua University, Nallatech, Bull, QLogic, and Bloombase had joined—bringing the total to approximately 80 members.
During the first OpenPOWER Summit held in 2015, membership reached 113 with newcomers including Wistron, Cirrascale Cloud Services, and PMC-Sierra. By late 2016, the number of members surpassed 250. As reported in July 2020, the foundation counted over 350 participating organizations.
See also
- IBM OpenPower – POWER5-based Power Systems running Linux
- PowerOpen Environment
- List of open-source hardware projects
- Open Compute Project
- OpenBMC
- OpenSPARC
External links
- ↑ OpenPower Foundation Resource Catalog
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namednvidia-nvlink - ↑ Day 2 keynote and OpenPOWER blows the doors off
- ↑ Chiselwatt's page on Github
- ↑ OpenPOWER Foundation hardware and software contributions