Power.org Initiative to Advance Community of Electronics Innovation

In a step sure to spark major innovation in the design of consumer electronics, networking, automotive, and IT systems, 15 companies today announced their intention to form Power.org, an open standards community around chips and systems which use Power Architecture technology.

"AMCC is excited to be a founding member of Power.org. AMCC is using the Power Architecture in industry-leading products targeted at storage, communications and pervasive computing markets. Power Architecture offers the best performance, software tools support and overall value proposition in the embedded computing market."

Power microprocessors are the heartbeat of products ranging from video gaming systems and telematics to supercomputers. As one of the industry's leading high performance customizable microprocessors, it has witnessed tremendous momentum this year.

Bill Muir, senior vice president, regional president, Asia, Jabil Circuit "Power Architecture will make significant inroads in markets spanning from consumer devices to high end servers, much as Linux has scaled from high-end servers to consumer devices."

Coming together to form the Power.org community are AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony Corporation, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales, Tundra Semiconductor and Wistron.

Power.org's members intend to define open specifications related to Power Architecture technology with two initial focus areas: bus architecture and high volume servers.

The bus architecture enables different components on the same "system on a chip" to work together. Standardizing the bus architecture eases the integration of technology from multiple vendors.

Rod Adkins, VP of Development, IBM Systems & Technology Group, said, "We have repeatedly seen how open standards increase customer choice in the marketplace and tear down barriers to integration.

Power Architecture technology is a significant change from the non-customizable architecture technologies of the past. It has already introduced multiple generations of dual core microprocessors to the industry and is a key technology behind the emerging processor code-named Cell.

"Cadence's endorsement as a member of Power.org is a natural extension of our long-standing leadership and innovation in driving open standards in the electronics design automation marketplace."

"Openness creates opportunity, and we are pleased to work with IBM as part of the founding group driving an initiative that promotes open standards for the technology industry."

"We are pleased to be a part of the founding of the Power.org consortium. Through this partnership with IBM, we will be able to offer innovative open architecture system designs from our headquarters in Shanghai."