sunset's gemlog

The Slow, Painful Death of Embedded PowerPC

It's hard to believe how far PowerPC has fallen. In 2010, chips from a half dozen companies were ubiquitous across the industry - servers, cars, game consoles, networking, defense. By 2015, embedded PPC was a pale ghost of itself, the Power.org consortium was effectively dead, and IBM was pinning the future of the platform on its server-oriented OpenPower initiative.

What happened?

LSI's impressive Axxia network processors, with their PPC 476 cores, were sold to Intel when Avago absorbed LSI. I'm pretty sure Xeon D and the network-oriented Atoms have bits and pieces of the LSI IP, but nothing especially recognizable, and certainly no PPC. LSI's future PPC64 core was canned. The storage-controller chips, which also contained PPC 476 cores, have largely been replaced with ARM devices.

Applied Micro, who inherited most of IBM's embedded portfolio, spent massive resources on the "Titan" microarchitecture co-developed with Intrinsity, then canceled it for unclear reasons around the time Intrinsity was acquired by Apple. APM then pivoted to ARM64 server processors, produced the uncompetitive "X-Gene" server chip, and was bought by Macom. Macom had no interest in APM's processor unit and promptly spun the unit off; today it's called Ampere Computing, and continues to build (actually rather good) ARM64 server parts.

I don't think the announced ChinaChip CC2000 ever existed. The rest of ChinaChip's lineup was ARM, and the company no longer seems to be in business.

Freescale got bought by NXP. The networking business - PowerQUICC and QorIQ - has been replaced with the ARM-based QorIQ Layerscape family, though it continues to be sold, especially for defense electronics. The automotive unit continues to sell PPC e200 parts, and occasionally (most recently in 2021) releases new ones - but it seems like a gradual shift to ARM is underway. NXP uses e200 cores as embedded or service cores elsewhere in the lineup, but they aren't generally user-visible.

IBM still uses PPC405 and 476 in management and control-plane roles - most notably the Power8/Power9 On Chip Controller and the lockstepped control cores in IBM's cryptographic coprocessors. Their volumes are not large. The core IP unit, responsible for cores like the A2 family and the in-order speedracer core used in the PS3 and the Xbox 360, appears to no longer exist.

C*Core, perhaps the most interesting, still actively designs and sells parts based on the PPC 476 (which they call "C9000") for a range of uses in the PRC domestic market. At one point a pair of new high-end cores, the C9100 and C10000, were roadmapped and then canceled before shipping; my strong suspicion is that the C9100 would have been an enhanced PPC 476 with VMX added, and that the C10000 would have been a member of IBM's A2 family (which saw use in Blue Gene/Q supercomputers and possibly in the PowerEN network processor.) Surprisingly enough, C*Core announced in early 2022 that a new and advanced PPC core, also named C10000 but probably unrelated to the canceled C10000 design, was in a late stage of development.

Anyway, happy new year, y'all. Hope it's a good one.