PowerPowerPC

POWERPowerPC is a hypothetical CPU architecture that envisions merging the IBM POWER and PowerPC instruction ecosystems into a single design. The term is used in speculative discussions and academic exercises about instruction-set interoperability and hardware compatibility. It is not an official IBM product or a standard.

Concept and goals: The project would aim to combine rigorous RISC design, high-performance out-of-order execution, and a broad software ecosystem. The architecture would support 64-bit operation and configurable endianness, enabling code that targets either POWER or PowerPC to run with minimal translation. A unified frontend could decode both instruction sets or rely on a dynamic binary translation layer. The memory hierarchy would include multi-level caches and a coherent, scalable interconnect suitable for multi-core and many-core configurations.

Instruction-set characteristics: The design would likely retain POWER-style condition registers and register windows from some POWER generations, while adopting PowerPC's fixed-length instructions and load/store approach. Optional vector processing extensions inspired by AltiVec and PPC's VMX/VSX could be included for multimedia and scientific workloads. The architecture would emphasize software portability, cross-compilation, and potentially binary compatibility with legacy POWER and PowerPC binaries through emulation or translation.

Status and reception: No hardware implementation or official roadmap exists in IBM or major vendors. The concept is primarily discussed in theoretical contexts and as a thought exercise for compiler design and ISA interoperability.

See also: IBM POWER, PowerPC, AltiVec, VMX, VSX, binary translation.