What is Power Architecture technology?
While some chip manufacturers have multiple architectures within a single company under a unified brand, Power Architecture technology offers a unified architecture spanning multiple companies under a single brand. • The Power Architecture family ultimately descends from the IBM 801, a high-performance RISC chip developed by IBM in the 1970s. Learn more about the past, present, and future of Power Architecture technology in “POWER to the people: A history of chipmaking at IBM” (developerWorks). • The article “Power Architecture: A High-Performance Architecture with a History” goes into more detail about things like endianness, and how and where (and even why) POWER™ and PowerPC® instructions differ (with the emphasis on the PowerPC side of things). • For more about the POWER side of things, see this excellent IBM SP Systems Overview write-up from the folks at Lawrence Livermore Labs, as well as Erik Klait’s column on “27 years of IBM RISC.” • As is usually the case with Wikipedia, its
