Why OpenPOWER
POWER gives you a royalty-free open ISA, a 30-year binary compatibility guarantee, and complete control over your hardware roadmap — so your team moves at the speed of your ambition, not a vendor's release cycle.
Every architecture claims performance. POWER is the only one that also gives you openness, sovereignty, and a 30-year track record across the most demanding computing environments on Earth — and in space.
POWER ISA is published under an irrevocable, royalty-free license. Any member can implement it, extend it, and fab it — no per-chip royalties, no patent tolls, no vendor approval required.
SMT8 delivers 8 hardware threads per core for enterprise-grade throughput. The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) provides hardware-native AI/ML computation — no separate coprocessor needed.
You audit every layer: ISA, microarchitecture, firmware, and OS. Multiple foundry options (Intel 18A, Samsung SF5, TSMC N3) eliminate single points of supply chain failure.
POWER silicon has run banking clearinghouses, HPC clusters, Mars rovers, JWST, and automotive safety systems for three decades. The ISA has never broken binary compatibility.
POWER ISA 3.1 isn't a retrofit. SMT8, MMA, and a 64-bit clean address space were designed in from the ground up — not bolted on after a decade of x86 compatibility patches.
Multiple qualified foundry options across US, Korea, and Taiwan geographies — no single-fab dependency.
| ISA Version | POWER ISA 3.1 |
| Max Threads/Core | SMT8 |
| Vector Width | 128-bit VSX · 512-bit MMA |
| Address Space | 64-bit clean |
| Process Target | 7nm / 5nm / 3nm |
| License | Apache 2.0 · Royalty-free |
| Binary Compat | 30+ years · unbroken |
| EDA Toolchain | IBM EDA Suite (SixthSense · EINSTEIN · BooleDozer) |
POWER's combination of openness, auditability, and raw performance makes it the architecture of choice when the stakes are too high for vendor lock-in.
Banks, cloud operators, and HPC labs that need full-stack control
Governments and defense organizations that cannot accept foreign silicon dependencies
200+ missions flown on radiation-hardened POWER silicon
30 years in safety-critical ECUs, from ABS to ADAS
Most "open" platforms are open at one layer and proprietary everywhere else. POWER is open — and auditable — at every level of the stack. You own the result, not just a license to use it.
The OPF Silicon Platform is a family of open-source POWER ISA 3.1 cores, each purpose-built for a specific vertical — from enterprise data centres to radiation-hardened spacecraft. All share a common ISA, one software stack, and one community.
POWER has first-class support across every major open-source project. The tools your teams use today — GCC, LLVM, PyTorch, Kubernetes — are built and tested on POWER. And for SIMD-heavy code, the OPF POWER Port toolchain ports ARM NEON and x86 SSE to POWER VSX in minutes.
Need to port SIMD-heavy code from ARM or x86?
The OPF POWER Port MCP Server (Apache 2.0, powered by VectorCamp's simd.ai 24B-parameter model) translates NEON and SSE4.2 intrinsics to POWER VSX in your editor — in minutes, not weeks.
Learn about POWER Port →From IBM and Raptor Computing Systems to dozens of universities and hundreds of individual contributors across 6 continents — the POWER ecosystem is the largest open hardware community in enterprise computing.
Co-invest in the platform, set the roadmap, and access consortium pricing on fabricated silicon. Membership starts at the Individual tier and scales to Platinum founding membership.
View Membership TiersAccess documentation, silicon specs, open-source RTL, and the POWER Port MCP server. Start porting your software stack and benchmarking POWER ISA 3.1 today.
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