IBM, Motorola Inc, and Apple Computer Inc formed the PowerPC Consortium back in 1991 to develop a set of RISC processors that would support IBM’s workstation and server lines (which ran on Power and proprietary chips), Apple’s workstations and laptops Intel’s x86 processors as well as RISC alternatives from Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment, and SGI Inc. While Apple and Motorola have had their ups and downs with the PowerPC, IBM has turned its Power chips into a strategic differentiator.
As the company said back in March at the original Power Everywhere event in New York, the company wants to do an end-run around the x86 and take over the high-end and low-end of the IT markets. IBM knows full well that it cannot get Power chips easily onto the desktop or in volume servers. But the chips are used by the tens of millions a year in all kinds of embedded devices (such as printers, PDAs, automobiles, routers, and game consoles) as well as in midrange and high-end servers.
However, developing and manufacturing the family of Power processors takes big bucks, and IBM needs to foster a community of Power chip enthusiasts who will help shoulder the burden of development and manufacturing.
For instance, IBM spent $2.5 billion to create the 300mm chip factory in East Fishkill, New York, where it makes its latest Power processors, and spent $500 million to design the Power4 and Power4+ processors. The company is right now expanding that East Fishkill facility, presumably to prepare for the manufacturing of the Cell Power-derived processors that Sony and Toshiba have been working with IBM for more than three years to develop for future game machines and consumer devices.
And they have paid for this Cell work; exactly how much is unknown, but the word on the street is that the three Cell partners have paid $400 million to create the chip, which is a variant of IBM’s 64-bit Power processors with huge amounts of floating point processing power.
Earlier this year, Sony gave IBM $325 million to work out the kinks in the 65 nanometer processes that were supposed to be used to create the Cell chips, which are now going to be made in IBM’s 90 nanometer processes. L-3 Communications, a defense electronics firm, said today that it would kick in $80 million over five years to license Power chip designs.
The Global Brands Manufacture Group, a Chinese computer maker, is looking at creating a line of Power-based desktops and laptops as well as digital cameras and DVD players and has similarly licensed Power technology from IBM. Chartered Semiconductor, a chip maker based in Singapore, will be the first non-IBM fab to make Power processors using IBM’s own 90 nanometer copper/SOI technologies; Infineon and Samsung also have licensing deals for custom Power chip designs and fabrication.
Somewhat strangely, not all of these players are yet members of the Power.org initiative. Toshiba was noticeably absent in the Power.org lineup, as were Motorola and Apple.
The Power.org community is similar in concept to the Eclipse Consortium that IBM launched several years ago with a $40 million grant to create a set of open-source development tools with a single interface and framework. In February 2004, the Eclipse consortium was reorganized into a nonprofit corporation that is completely independent from IBM. Power.org is already independent from IBM, and is organized much like Eclipse in that it has founding members who organize themselves into working groups.
IBM has not said how much seed money it has pumped into Power.org, but the company says that it is donating intellectual property. One example is the Core Connect bus interface used in embedded Power processors, which Big Blue says has 1,500 licensees already. The founding members of Power.org include IBM and Sony as well as AMCC, Bull (which rebadges IBM’s Power servers), Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron. The idea is to allow these companies who are interested in Power chips to collaborate without having IBM necessarily in the loop.
As part of the Beijing announcements, IBM has promised to add 150 engineers to its Power Architecture Technology Center in Shanghai over the next 18 to 24 months; the Power chips used to be designed exclusively in a PowerPC facility in Austin, Texas and in IBM’s labs in Rochester, Minnesota, but the political and economic realities are such that if IBM wants China to push Power, it has to give Chinese engineers jobs.
IBM also is working on a deal with Shanghai Belling, China’s biggest semiconductor company, for it to license Power chip technology and make chips for consumer devices. Peking University is also going to host a cluster of Power servers to allow software developers to test open source applications without having to buy their own servers.
IBM’s top people in the Microelectronics Division also outlined an emerging chip technology called wet immersion lithography, which allows tweaked versions of the current class of lithography equipment used to make 300mm wafers to support thinner transistor lines. By using de-ionized water or other liquids, where light can be bent more efficiently than it can be in air and therefore smaller circuits should be possible, thereby upholding Moore’s Law (the number of transistors you can pack on a chip doubles every 18 months or so).
IBM has been able to build variants of the Power chips using this under water lithography, and is the first company to do so. The process has been under development for a number of years. IBM did not say its Microelectronics Division might bring it to market with commercial Power chips.
