Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   pinskia (pinskia@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 05:00:54 JST pinskia

   in reply to

   • jn

   @jn I have one of the power.org shirts. A funny shirt to wear to a family get together because many folks think it was about BDSM :).

   • Embed this notice
     jn (jn@boopsnoot.de)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 05:00:55 JST jn

     in reply to

     IBM and Motorola/Freescale/NXP seemingly never managed to keep their cooperations alive, so you had AIM which developed PowerPC "1", Power.org which developed Power ISA 2.xx, and the OpenPOWER foundation, which developed Power ISA 3.xx, but by then NXP had moved on to ARM64, it seems.

   • Embed this notice
     jn (jn@boopsnoot.de)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 05:00:56 JST jn

     in reply to

     Power ISA 2.xx consists of multiple "books":

     - Book I: the User Instruction Set Architecture, i.e. what userspace programs can rely on
     - Book II: the Virtual Environment Architecture, which details memory access characteristics, caching, etc.
     - Book III: the Operating Environment Architecture — but there are actually two of it:
     - Book III-S: OEA for Servers, continuing IBM's tradition, including LPARs
     - Book III-E: OEA for Embedded, after Fsl's tradition

     Power ISA 3.0 unified Book III

   • Embed this notice
     jn (jn@boopsnoot.de)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 05:00:57 JST jn

     If you're learning about PowerPC and wondering where the "Books" (1, 2, 3s, 3e) are: They're in the Power ISA specs. A rough timeline:

     - 1990: IBM introduces the POWER Architecture
     - 1993: The AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) introduces PowerPC (aka. AIM PowerPC). Apple and IBM build computers based on these shared chip designs
     - ~2007: IBM and Motorola (now known as Freescale) get back together to introduce the Power ISA spec, 2.xx, which unifies what they've each been doing separately.