Power.org Keeps Up with the Intels

By Doug Barney

In our last newsletter we gave a sneak preview of the Power.org developer conference, scheduled to coincide as nearly as possible with Intel’s much larger developer get together.

Now that the conference in Austin is over, we can report more fully on everything that happened. Power.org, which is keeping the PowerPC architecture very much alive (the IBM System p line is doing its share as well), is in pretty tight with the open source community. To keep that momentum going, Power.org announced a new Linux Developer Kit and Reference Platform. The idea is to help developers build apps that exploit the dual-core Power chip. The kit comes with not just Linux kernel code, but modifiable virtualization in the form of source coded for the XEN hypervisor.

Power.org is also making a run for the embedded market (a heckuva nice match with its Linux roots), and is working on a new spec for embedded developers.

For those of us who might think the Power chip is losing steam, IBM claims it has a version of the chip that makes it the fastest microprocessor in the world.  And while IBM makes tons of dough on Wintel servers, it has a pretty cool energy-efficient line of Power6-based servers offering from 1 to 64 cores.