Difference between revisions of "POWER"
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Revision as of 20:00, 28 April 2008
POWER is an acronym which stands for for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC.[1] It was used as the name of a 32-bit processor architecture jointly developed by IBM, Apple and Motorola in 1991.
It referred to a RISC processor which was "superscalar", that is, was able to submit multiple instructions to multiple execution pipelines in a single processor cycle.
The successor architecture, PowerPC, was based POWER, but added the ability to support multiple processors, as well as expanding to 64-bit addressing and operations.[1]
And its successor architechture, Amazon, expanded the PowerPC "definition to support single-level store, decimal arithmetic, high-speed data movement, improved branching, fast call/return, and other functions needed in a commercial server"[1] as well as "capabilities...for a multi-user, multi-application system."[1]
