ARM is an "open" architecture—it's fairly easy to roll your own if you have an FPGA and patience to read through arch specifications for a couple months. I would be highly surprised if you could get equivalent documentation for POWER without a significant bit of cash. Not that I blame them, even open standards can cost a couple hundred.
I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to justify an architecture switch for either hardware or software people. And that's a damn shame. I cut my teeth on PowerPC and I couldn't imagine a better way, it's a beautiful architecture. Altivec STILL makes intel's vector processing look like a toy.
Comments
ARM is an "open" architecture—it's fairly easy to roll your own if you have an FPGA and patience to read through arch specifications for a couple months. I would be highly surprised if you could get equivalent documentation for POWER without a significant bit of cash. Not that I blame them, even open standards can cost a couple hundred.
I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to justify an architecture switch for either hardware or software people. And that's a damn shame. I cut my teeth on PowerPC and I couldn't imagine a better way, it's a beautiful architecture. Altivec STILL makes intel's vector processing look like a toy.
https://www.power.org/documentation/power-isa-version-2-07/
BTW, if you want to roll your own ARM you have to negotiate for an architectural license.
I would hope not for a personal FPGA... that's hilariously unenforcable.