All I see in the actual announcement[2] is marketing hype (not news) about software that already exists ("open firmware" == U-Boot, "open software" == linux) and hardware that has been licensable for years.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing
[2] http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41684.wss
I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to justify an architecture switch for either hardware or software people. And that's a damn shame. I cut my teeth on PowerPC and I couldn't imagine a better way, it's a beautiful architecture. Altivec STILL makes intel's vector processing look like a toy.
BTW, if you want to roll your own ARM you have to negotiate for an architectural license.
I would hope not for a personal FPGA... that's hilariously unenforcable.
I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
x86 is likely something like the 4th or 5th largest chip architecture by volume shipped today. Last estimate I've seen was in the 360 million range per year, maybe as high as 400 million.
That's after ARM, likely to ship 3 billion this year, MIPS and PPC probably in the 500+ million range each unless there's been massive unexpected changes over the last year.
X86 gets all the attention because it's on desktops and in laptops and because Intel is disproportionally important because their revenue is several times that of any other CPU manufacturer because nobody else ships nearly as many high end chips (e.g this puts Intel at 7 times Qualcomm, at second place, in revenue from CPU/MPU's last year: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130521205843_Inte... )
And for the surprise contender, it is unclear where the 6502 architecture falls: It ships in "hundreds of millions" a year according to Western Design Centre). Note that this might very well largely be in the form of licenses for embedding the cores in custom ASICs or in FPGAs, so whether you'd want to count that is another matter (as an example, some Amiga's had keyboards with an embedded 6502 core + PROM and a tiny amount of RAM). It's possible that some of the other extremely low end 8-bit CPU cores that are still being used as micro-controllers might also ship volumes like that.
I've seen no indication that Sparc is anywhere in the running
POWER stalled in the performance/watt category around the time of the Power Mac G5: unfortunate, since this was around the time that performance/watt was starting to be considered a real thing. That hurt the architecture's standing terribly. But it's still around.
For some reason that was the first thing that came to mind, reading your comment ;-)
I was there and it didn't! TBL did development on Next. There were some text mode browsers that worked on Unix only. The popular graphical browser was Mosaic[1] which started out as Unix/X windows only. It was run on Sun, HP, IBM, SGI etc workstations (32 bit).
At that time popular Windows was still 16 bit. It didn't even include TCP/IP with various third party stacks (for a price) and later a Microsoft stack for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Some brave people did start porting Mosaic but it was hard because a completely different GUI API and semantics was needed, as well as dealing with the cramped machines compared to the 32 bit workstations. It was late 1994 before these ports became somewhat usable.
Netscape was formed around then, and the big difference was they made their code portable to multiple guis from the very beginning (a lot easier than retrofitting it). By 1995 every platform had to have TCP/IP and a web browser to be relevant. The web spread because no one was in charge, and everything had to work everywhere on a wide variety of screen sizes, operating systems and user environments.
ie it was the diversity of systems out there that was the cause, not that you could buy the PC architecture from different companies.
Can you explain that? Because I cannot make any sense out of it.
Also, the main thing with the PS3 was the Cell architecture which was going to appear in every type of device from TVs to mainframes and make the rest of the processor industry obsolete.
In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.
And both ARM and PowerPC outsel x86 by a hell of a lot more than a factor of 2. It's at least a factor of 10, and that's almost certainly low too. x86, in terms of units sold, is an extremely small market.
Big data still requires a lot of power to move it.
Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.
Admittedly it was a smidgeon more expensive than the Raspberry Pi.
They're making a kajillion PPC based processors for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, so it's not like they don't have designs for current manufacturing processes. The chip in the 360 can't cost more than $50 today, and if stripped down (2 cores vs. 3), clocked less aggressively (1GHz vs. 3.2GHz) could probably be cut to $25 or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platf...
Yeah, no.
Some more competition for Intel x86 and some widespread availability of Power machines (that don't cost a bazillion dollars) has felt like a pipe dream for years, and I'm not optimistic now...
