Power ISA
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Power ISA is the specification for how Power architecture processors are to behave. It dictates the machine instructions available, and exactly how they are to process given data.
There are two primary versions of the Power ISA that are of interest to PowerNV platforms:
History
The Power ISA evolved from the PowerPC ISA which in turn was an evolution of the POWER ISA used by POWER1 and POWER2 chips.
POWER ISA → PowerPC ISA → Power ISA
When the Power ISA 3.0B specification lists all available instructions, it specifically mentions what version of which architecture introduced the instruction; this gives a fairly quick history of the ISA itself:
| Code | Specification | Compliant cores |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | POWER Architecture | |
| P2 | POWER2 Architecture | |
| PPC | PowerPC Architecture prior to v2.00 | |
| v2.00 | PowerPC Architecture v2.00 | |
| v2.01 | PowerPC Architecture v2.01 | |
| v2.02 | PowerPC Architecture v2.02 | |
| v2.03 | Power ISA v2.03 | PPC405, PPC440, PPC460, PPC970, Cell PPE, e200, e500, POWER5 |
| v2.04 | Power ISA v2.04 | |
| v2.05 | Power ISA v2.05 | POWER6 |
| v2.06 | Power ISA v2.06 | e5500, POWER7 |
| v2.06B | Power ISA v2.06B | |
| v2.07 | Power ISA v2.07 | e6500, POWER8 |
| v2.07B | Power ISA v2.07B | |
| v3.0 | Power ISA v3.0 | |
| v3.0B | Power ISA v3.0B | POWER9 |
