Announcing a New Era of Openness with Power 3.0

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I am excited to announce the availability of the next generation of the Power Architecture. The next generation of the Power Architecture heralds a new era for systems. The new Power Instruction Set Architecture 3.0 (Power ISA 3.0)  marks the first generation of architecture developed and released since the creation of the OpenPOWER Foundation, and sustains the growth of OpenPOWER as an open ecosystem built around collaborative innovation.

Marking this new era, the new Power 3.0 architecture reflects the values of our open ecosystem by creating the platform for developing new exciting ideas into the systems of tomorrow. To enable architects to build on a solid base and protect today’s investments in Power-based software and solutions, the Power Architecture stays true to its roots of compatibility for applications developed in previous architecture generations.  Consequently, programs going back to the beginning of POWER remain compatible with the new Instruction Set Architecture defined by Power ISA 3.0.

Power 3.0 continues the evolution of the RISC ISA concepts pioneered by the Power Architecture to deliver high-performance scalable systems optimized around workload needs.  The new architecture specification includes enhancements for a broad spectrum of workloads: improved support for string and memory primitives with the vector string facility, expanded little-endian support, instruction fusion and pc-relative addressing in support of improved application portability, hardware garbage collection acceleration, enhanced in-memory database support, interrupt and system call enhancements, and hardware support for the native Linux radix  page table format.

Power ISA 3.0 supports the entire spectrum of application choices with a common architecture definition to ensure the same level of compatibility that IBM enterprise customers have enjoyed over the past 3 decades to all members of the OpenPOWER ecosystem.  Consequently, Power ISA 3.0 no longer has optional categories, or separate server and embedded ISA architecture options, as the new specification supports the entire range of implementations.

You can find out more about the new workload features in Power ISA 3.0 here => ibm.biz/power-isa3