Power.org was an organization whose purpose was to develop, enable, and promote Power Architecture technology. Its objective was to establish open standards, guidelines, best practices and certifications for Power Architecture, and to drive adoption of the platform. Power.org was founded in 2004 by IBM, and 15 other companies joined as members the day the group's website was created. Freescale joined in 2006 as an honorary founding member and was given similar status as IBM. A year later it announced a landmark technology development deal with IBM. Power.org had over 40 paying members, corporations, governmental and educational institutions, and over 10,000 developers. As of today, Power Architecture is being developed by members of the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is responsible for releasing open documentation for the architecture.
History
Power.org is founded – The Power.org site is opened.
Freescale joins – Freescale joins Power.org.
The brand – Establishing "Power Architecture" as a brand, unifying products based on POWER, PowerPC, PowerQUICC and Cell under one common flag.
Power ISA v2.03 – The unified instruction set for Power Architecture processors, joining 15 years of development on POWER and PowerPC architectures.
Released the ePAPR specification – A specification for embedded systems.
Organization
Power.org consisted of a Board of Directors which consists of founding members and others. Several committees and subcommittees governed and managed the organization's goals, projects, and responsibilities. Members had no veto rights in the decision processes of what defined the Power ISA: this was IBM's and Freescale's responsibility.
Membership
Power.org had a tiered membership model, with four levels: Founder, Sponsor, Participant, Associate and Developer. Developer membership was free of charge. Members included:
Power.org introduced and promoted Power Architecture during the time it was active. Power Architecture was a marketing term that was used to collectively refer to any specification, hardware, and software related to the POWER, PowerPC, and Power ISA architectures.
