OpenPOWER Foundation
The IBM-founded, now community-governed foundation that opened the Power ISA to royalty-free licensing, and the institutional structure that any Power12 architecture change has to work within.
IBM initiated the OpenPOWER Foundation in 2013 to open the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to outside licensing and collaboration. Compliant implementers can design, manufacture, and innovate on Power ISA-based processors and systems under royalty-free patent licensing, rather than needing a direct commercial license from IBM for every implementation.
The Foundation now counts more than 350 member organizations, spanning hardware partners, software vendors, and research institutions collaborating on Power ISA hardware, firmware, and open-source software integration -- including Linux and KVM hypervisor support.
For Power12 specifically, the Foundation matters less as a source of specifications and more as institutional evidence for IBM's stated design philosophy: vertical integration (IBM controls the full stack from silicon to firmware to OS) paired with openness (the ISA itself is licensable), and enterprise reliability (RAS) as a design constraint that outside implementers must also meet to carry the Power ISA name.
Related
IBM Telum II Processor
IBM's mainframe-class processor with a native, on-chip AI accelerator delivering 24 trillion operations per second -- four times the AI throughput of the original Telum chip.
IBM Spyre Accelerator
IBM's PCIe-based AI accelerator card, built for on-premises generative and traditional AI inference, with confirmed Power11 compatibility arriving December 2025.
IBM AIU Chip Family
IBM Research's family of purpose-built AI accelerator chips, the research lineage feeding IBM's production AI silicon strategy across mainframe, Power, and cloud.
Open Memory Interface (OMI)
IBM's proprietary memory interconnect, replacing direct DDR signaling with a high-speed serial protocol that already powers Power10 and Power11's DDR5 DDIMM memory.
Frequently Asked
What role does the OpenPOWER Foundation play in Power 12?
Any change IBM makes to the Power instruction set architecture -- including a chiplet transition -- happens within the governance and royalty-free licensing structure the OpenPOWER Foundation maintains. The Foundation itself doesn't set IBM's product roadmap, but it is the institutional backdrop for IBM's stated commitment to ISA continuity and controlled openness across generations.