IBM, Freescale collaborate on Power Architecture

06.02.2006
PowerPC chip vendors IBM and Austin-based Freescale Semiconductors Inc. Monday announced plans to work together on the evolution of Power Architecture technology. The collaboration was announced at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

The two companies plan to work together to develop a common Power instruction set architecture, enable Linux on the Power processor and develop innovations to extend Power Architecture processors to a broader range of implementations. They also plan to make an effort to better understand each company's Power Processor road maps.

The collaboration is also aimed at pushing Power technology into a variety of new products in the consumer electronics, industrial, automotive, enterprise systems, telecommunications and supercomputing fields, the companies said.

"Power Architecture technology is at the forefront of the world's leading computing devices from Blue Gene, the world's most powerful supercomputer, to enterprise systems, automobiles and all of the leading video game platforms," said John Kelly, senior vice president of technology and intellectual property at IBM. "Power Architecture not only is extremely scalable and versatile -- it is extremely open. We look forward to collaboratively innovating with Freescale to extend [the architecture's] capabilities."

Freescale, a spin-off of Motorola Inc., also said it has joined Power.org as a founding member. Michel Mayer, chairman and CEO of Freescale, said the two companies are committed to the technology and to the open tools, solutions and platforms in the Power.org community.

"As allied leaders and founding members of Power.org, we have the technical and financial resources to drive the proliferation of Power Architecture microprocessor-based platforms throughout the consumer-driven, networked world," Mayer said.