[PATCH] General CHRP/MPC5K2 Platform and drivers support - to comment

Benjamin Herrenschmidt benh at kernel.crashing.org
Tue Oct 24 07:38:32 EST 2006


On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 16:47 +0200, Matt Sealey wrote:
> Curious question.
> 
> What are you guys going to do when the PowerPC name is defunct?

It's not really, is it ? I don't care anyway, it will stay PowerPC in
linux of course :)

> Like, last month :)
> 
> Power Architecture is where it is at. The trademark is even going to
> lapse

Who cares ? Besides, while PAPR says "Power architecture", the processor
architecture specification says PowerPC :)

> . It's a bit too late for the ppc->powerpc tree breakout now,
> but wouldn't it just confuse people to be using a "Power Architecture"
> processor or SoC of some type, using collections of definitions from
> the Power ISA 2.03 and have this "powerpc" thing pop up?

It's PowerPC ISA :)

> It confused me even before, because ppc and ppc64 have also been
> used to support real POWER (with a capital P, O, W, E and R) processors,
> and now these are lumped in with powerpc which is no better than
> ppc64 in these terms?

Historically, POWER means something else ... then with POWER3, POWER
processors became compatible with the PowerPC architecture, then IBM
played name changing game a couple of times and nobody knows what's up
anymore :)
 
> Just flexing my marketing exec muscles, see if they work, never done
> it before. Oh... *crack*.. that wasn't a good noise :]

AFAIK, the processor instruction set architecture is PowerPC an that
will not change.

Ben.





More information about the Linuxppc-dev mailing list