We wonder if the following should be interpreted as the end of PowerPC at IBM or a perhaps more interestingly as an indication of something new to come:

Dear Bill,

Please be advised that the Ready for IBM Technology - PowerPC microprocessor validation offering - has been terminated and is closed to new participants effective 21 May, 2010.

Qualifying Business Partners must cease using the IBM Technology Trademarks on their Web sites within thirty (30) days of the termination date of this offering. In addition, within sixty (60) days of the termination date of this offering, qualifying Business Partners will cease using the IBM Technology Trademarks in all Marketing Materials and must destroy all Marketing Materials related to this offering.

There are no changes to your company’s PartnerWorld benefits therefore no action is required regarding your PartnerWorld membership. If you have any questions, PartnerWorld Contact Services will be happy to assist you at...

Sincerely,

The PartnerWorld team
Explore Possibilities. Stimulate Solutions.

If you are not aware of the program, please look here for the Ready for IBM Technology - PowerPC microprocessor trademark:

PegasosPPC
Open Desktop Workstation
Genesi Firmware (Aura)
MorphOS

So, in a couple of months these pages should be gone. What does it mean? We think IBM is coming back into the end user market. Whether or not that means we will see PowerPC again is yet to be determined, but something is happening. IBM can't just ride the IT wave forever with Apple and Google introducing such dramatic and successful change in the market.

What do you think?

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

I also like being positive, but it's hard being so at the sight of words "terminated ", "closed" and "must cease". By the way, those pages referencing Genesi products are already gone from their web site.

Next thought is, of course, if this is just Big Blue dropping a trademark that was never theirs. Their big iron products are based on POWER technology, which is not dead, just invisible (ouch). I don't see them shutting down Blue Gene.

But would IBM be interested in pushing again their core server technology into the consumer market?

I'm totally puzzled. On one hand, they're closing a partner program, which would be understandable if the corresponding market has shrunk sufficiently. But I don't see it having reached that point - industrial SBC vendors still actively use the architecture (ok, employing way more freescale than IBM's products, but still). And what's with the short deadlines for disengagement from the program?

Of all IT companies I've ever tried to grasp the way of their business thinking, IBM remain a complete enigma to me - never understood why they'd do/not-do something the way it turns out from them. I've been way more successful with figuring out entities like nintendo and apple - heck, those are like the epitome of human logic when compared to IBM. Actually, I suspect IBM are not following any human logic.. *cue in x-files theme*

@Juan Carlos

Still there for us...

Genesi RFIT Solutions

R&B

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

i can only suppose is, simply, a scheduled switch to the new "built on Power" brand.

_________________
acrux _at_ linuxmail _dot_ org

....and that maybe this involves an end user device.

?!?!

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Of course that could be. But big companies sometimes tend to have some bureaucracy overhead. I.e. I could imagine that there is virtually no change in products and strategies, but it is just a technical action to remove the "PowerPC" brand in favour of "Power" - just as decided a while ago.

But new "Power" based consumer products would be nice, though.

We were not the only company to react to this message. This is from the Curtiss-Wright Embedded Computing mailing list today (with our emphasis/underlining)...

New CHAMP-AV5 6U VME DSP Engine Brings Latest Dual-Core Intel® Core™ i7 Processor to Demanding Military Signal Processing Applications

The new CHAMP-AV5 is Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing’s first DSP engine with the new Intel Core i7 processor, representing an industry milestone in bringing the low-power/high-performance advantages of Intel processor technology to demanding military signal processing applications. The CHAMP-AV5 multi-processing board brings the floating point performance of the Intel Core i7 architecture to the VME64x form factor standard. Utilizing a pair of 2.53GHz dual-core Core i7 processors, the CHAMP-AV5 delivers up to 81 GFLOPs of performance. The CHAMP-AV5 features a high-bandwidth PCIe architecture, featuring on-board PCIe connections between the processors and the PMC/XMC sites. With 4Mbytes of cache and two hardware threads per core, the Core i7 processor can process larger vectors at peak rates significantly greater than was possible with previous AltiVec™-based systems....

<snip>

Recent Embedded Computing White Papers

Intel® x86-Based Digital Signal Processing - Using the Intel Architecture in High-Performance Military Embedded Signal Processing Applications
Military Radar and Signal Intelligence applications place a premium on floating point performance, memory bandwidth and overall performance per Watt. This white paper, co-authored by Ian Stalker, DSP Product Marketing Manager, Curtiss-Wright and Peter Carlston, Platform Architect, Intel discusses the benefits of the Intel architecture for DSP applications. With the demise of AltiVec in the latest Power Architecture processors, the Intel Core i7 and follow-on processors are poised to power the next era of high-performance, floating-point centric applications. Read why.

Do they sound frustrated?

The really sad, sad fact is that the people that made the fatal decisions about PowerPC and AltiVec made them based on an Excel spreadsheet. They never understood the market. They did not respect their day to day customers. Even worse, they never understood the developers that had invested themselves in the architecture and the code that leverage the benefits of AltiVec. This is what vitalized the business! These managers won't be remembered unless in infamy. They never made an effort to step out of the very comfortable environment from which they managed. They will fade away with corporate benefits and a retirement they don't deserve. Perhaps, one day some one will write a book...

Life goes on, and so does the world of technology. We are headed to next. Let's get on with it, but let's not forget the kind of people and the type of company that is incapable of managing past a quarterly P&L. We expect more and we know you do too. Enough for now. Back to work!

@ Juan Carlos
Exactly.

The ability to make a difference is a good thing too.

'Power' has many meanings, but in nearly all cases using it properly is the key.

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Excellent writeup. I also think the same about people wearing ties: It's a proven fact that they diminish blood irrigation to the brain.

But it happens that, actually, the world works in this stupid way. Managers are isolated from the people that do the actual job. And you won't find many suits abandoning the comfort of their offices to change that.

The funniest thing is that you better act that way, because everyone else does so. If not, you are a weirdo that won't be hired by any serious company.

Because serious companies work like this. If a completely unkownledgeable suit shuts down a whole company branch because of numbers crafted in a (Excel, of course) worksheet, he or she is RIGHT to do so. Because he or she HAS to do so. Because everyone else does. Those SUPPOSEDLY real and unbiasesd figures justify their acts, like law. Of course, they came from equelly minded suits.

Knowing very well your business, and how you do your things, is not required nowadays. You ask for specific figures to take specific decisions, which were already in your intentions. It's just for the peace of mind (and company recognition) that an (Excel, of course) worksheet brings.

The next day, a bunch of brilliant, hard working, but badly driven employees go through the door, leaving the company forever, along with their unvaluable know-how, lost forever.

The luckiest ones will be able to get another job... in another brain dead company.

Did anyone say global crisis?

@JC We might not go that far, but we will say this...

Management deserves the union it gets.

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Maybe IBM is burying Power, except for its own Power super servers, but luckily there is life outside of IBM :-) Freescale's QurIQ looks very promising. See http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... QORIQ_HOME

I hope to put my hands on one of these boards:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... H3bTdG25E4

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News ... l-CAK2000/ ( http://www.portwell.com/products/detail ... 1=CAK-2000 ).

Any of these would be a very nice replacement for my original EFIKA (PPC MPC5200), which I still my router/firewall/NAS/torrent box/etc. in use :-)

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

I finally took the time to gloss over the e500 reference manual. Interesting tweaks to the classic PPC ISA, to say the least. I can't get rid of the feeling that e500 came to be when a G3 pipeline mated with a late ARM ISA. And I'm not sure how I feel about the merging of GPR and FPR space. On one hand, it tears down the cpu/fpu barrier in the PPC ISA. On the other, the GPR file becomes a point of contention between int and fp code. But one thing is sure - I'm more curious about the e500 now : )