What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …