The IBM-led OpenPOWER Foundation announced the contribution of the IBM A2I POWER processor core design and associated FPGA environment to the open source ecosystem. The release, which took place today at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, follows the opening of the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) last August and is intended to enable the OpenPOWER Foundation to advance open hardware collaboration, according to the foundation.
The A2I core is an in-order multi-threaded 64-bit POWER ISA core developed as a processor for customization and embedded use in system-on-chip (SoC) devices. It was designed to provide high streaming throughput while balancing performance and power.
Originally the “wire-speed processor” of the Edge-of-Network SoC called PowerEN, it was later selected as the general purpose processor used in IBM’s BlueGene/Q family of HPC systems used for scientific computing workloads. Built for modularity, A2I can add an Auxiliary Execution Unit (AXU) that is tightly coupled to the core, enabling options for special-purpose designs.
“A2I has demonstrated its durability over the last decade – it’s a powerful technology with a wide range of capabilities,” said Mendy Furmanek, president of the OpenPOWER Foundation and director, POWER open hardware business development, IBM. “We’re excited to see what the open source community can do to modernize A2I with today’s open POWER ISA and to adapt the technology to new markets and diverse use cases.”
The A2I core is available here on GitHub.
In related news, the Linux Foundation yesterday announced that the SODA Foundation, previously called OpenSDS, is expanding to include both open source software and standards to support data autonomy. SODA Foundation hosts an open source, unified and autonomous data management framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud.
Premiere members include China Unicom, Fujitsu, Huawei, NTT Communications and Toyota Motor Corporation. Other members include China Construction Bank Fintech, Click2Cloud, GMO Pepabo, IIJ, MayaData, LinBit, Scality, Sony, Wipro and Yahoo Japan.
