Power.org Releases Power Instruction Set Architecture Version 2.06
Power Instruction Set Architecture Version 2.06 Available
Power.org, the organization that promotes and develops standards for Power Architecture® technology, today announced the release of Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA(TM)) Version 2.06, which incorporates significant advances for server and embedded applications that improve performance and efficiency, and speed design cycles. The revised ISA can be downloaded from www.power.org/resources/downloads/.
Power ISA Version 2.06 defines significant extensions for the embedded environment including an enhanced memory management architecture, logical partitioning and hypervisor support, embedded page table support, and multi-threading. It contains a new vector-scalar floating-point facility that merges and extends existing vector and scalar floating-point operations; numerous new fixed-point, floating-point, and memory-management instructions; a new storage attribute in support of strong storage access ordering, and many other enhancements.
For server applications, Power ISA Version 2.06 includes major extensions to the scalar and SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) floating-point architecture. The Vector-Scalar Extension (VSX) unifies and extends the existing scalar floating-point and vector facilities to improve floating-point performance for compute-intensive tasks. VSX introduces support for double-precision floating-point vector operations and consolidates existing vector and floating-point scalar registers into a unified 64-entry register file. These enhancements enable increased parallelism in double-precision floating-point processing with better execution pipeline utilization, leading to increased application performance.
“Power Architecture technology continues to adapt to market-driven requirements and break new ground in areas like virtualization and performance,” said Wolfram Sauer, chairman of the Power Architecture Advisory Council.
About Power.org
Power Architecture technology is behind millions of innovative products, including the world’s fastest supercomputers, leading video game consoles, and electronic systems in most of today’s car models. Every phone call, email and Web page touches hundreds of Power Architecture systems. Power Architecture is the only computer architecture in the world with proven scalability from the smallest devices to the largest supercomputers while preserving user application binary compatibility.
The open Power.org community, formed in 2005, is the organization driving collaborative innovation around Power Architecture technology. Power.org’s mission is to optimize interoperability, accelerate innovation and drive increased adoption of this leading processor architecture. For more details, visit www.power.org.
