IBM Takes Next Step in Opening Power Architecture to Research and Education Community

PALO ALTO, CA - 14 Dec 2005: At a Power.org event in Palo Alto, California today, IBM announced plans to make the specifications of IBM’s PowerPC 405 core freely available to researchers and academia.

IBM plans to coordinate the contribution of the 405 core through Power.org, which was formed one year ago to enable and promote Power Architecture technology as the preferred collaborative hardware development platform for the electronics industry.

The move is in response to requests by leading educators in computer science and participants in collaborative multi-core processing research projects, such as the Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP). RAMP is led by the University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of Texas -Austin and the University of Washington.

RAMP researchers will now be able to map this core into their FPGA-based systems (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), for new chip architecture experiments.

“Access to this Power Architecture technology and the large, diverse Power Architecture community will help enable our vision,” said Professor David A. Patterson, University of California Berkeley. “RAMP is a broad collaboration to deliver an extremely flexible, low-cost platform for experimenting with massively parallel systems on a chip.”

“The contribution of the IBM PowerPC 405 core will allow researchers and educators to better explore new computing architectures for massively parallel systems and accelerators, and assist software developers in experimenting with new programming models on these systems,” said Nigel Beck, chairman, Power.org. “This family of cores is at the heart of networking and communications devices ranging from gaming consoles to the BlueGene/L supercomputer.”



About IBM
IBM develops, manufactures and markets state-of-the-art semiconductor and interconnect technologies, products and services including Power Architecture microprocessors. IBM semiconductors are a major contributor to the company’s position as the world’s largest information technology company. Its chip products and solutions power IBM eServer and TotalStorage systems as well as many of the world’s best-known electronics brands. IBM semiconductor innovations include dual-core microprocessors, copper wiring, silicon-on-insulator and silicon germanium transistors, strained silicon, and eFUSE, a technology that enables computer chips to automatically respond to changing conditions. The White House recently awarded IBM the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest technical honor, for 40 years of innovation in semiconductors. More information is available at: http://www.ibm.com/chips

About Power.org
Power.org is an open standards industry group dedicated to accelerating collaborative innovation on the Power microprocessor technology. Power Architecture microprocessors are the heartbeat of products ranging from video gaming systems and telematics to supercomputers. For more information, visit www.power.org. Formed just one year ago, its members include: IBM, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Jabil Circuit, Novell, P.A. Semi, Red Hat, Synopsys, and Thales.
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