Power.org

Power.org is an organization whose purpose is to develop, enable and promote Power Architecture technology. The objective is to establish open standards, guidelines, best practices and certifications regarding Power Architecture, as well as drive adoption of the platform.

Power.org was founded in 2004 by IBM, 15 other companies joined as members the day the site http://power.org was created. Freescale joined in 2006 as a founding member and was given similar status as IBM. Power.org have over 40 paying members, corporations, governmental and educational institutions, and over 10.000 developers.

Milestones

• Power.org is founded (Dec 2004) – The Power.org site is opened.
• Freescale joins (Feb 2006) – Freescale joins Power.org.
• The brand – (July 2006) Establishing "Power Architecture" as a brand, unifying products based on POWER, PowerPC, PowerQUICC and Cell under one common flag.
• Power ISA v2.03 (Nov 2006) – The unified instruction set for Power Architecture processors, joining 15 years of development on POWER and PowerPC architectures.
• Power Architecture Platform Reference or PAPR (Nov 2006) – The foundation for development of standard Power Architecture computers running the Linux operating system.
• Unified roadmap (Nov 2006) – A common roadmap for Power Architecture processors from different vendors.^[1]
• Power Architecture Developer Conference (Sept 2007)^[2]
• Released the Common Debug API Specification (Dec 2008)^[3]
• Released the ePAPR specification (Dec 2008) – A specification for embedded systems.^[4]

Organization

Power.org consists of a Board of Directors which consists of founding members and others. Several committees and subcommittees govern and manages the organization's goals, projects and responsibilities. Members have no veto rights in the decisions processes of what defines the Power Architecture, this is IBM's and Freescale's responsibility.

Membership

Power.org has a tiered membership model, with four levels: Founder, Sponsor, Participant and Developer. Developer membership is free for anyone.

Members

Not a complete list:

• IBM (founder)
• Freescale (founder)
• Cadence (founder)
• Synopsys (founder)
• AMCC
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center
• Broadcom
• Bull
• Chartered
• CoWare
• Curtiss-Wright
• Denali
• Ericsson
• Genesi
• Green Hills Software
• HCL Technologies
• Kyocera
• LynuxWorks
• Mentor Graphics
• Mercury Computer Systems
• National Instruments
• OKI
• P.A. Semi
• Rapport
• Sony
• Terra Soft
• Thales Group
• Tundra Semiconductor
• Universitat Mannheim
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• Virtutech
• Wind River
• Xilinx
• XGI Technology

External links

• Power.org's homepage
• Discussion about Power.org

References

1. ^ http://www.power.org/resources/devcorner/roadmap
2. ^ http://www.power.org/devcon/07
3. ^ http://www.ibtimes.com/prnews/20081202/power-org-releases-common-debug-application-programming-interface-specification.htm
4. ^ http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212300381