POWER is still holding on just barely but I do suspect that IBM are looking to sunset it in the next few years.
replyGiven that IBM just announced a dual-ISA mainframe with support for both z/arch and ARM, they might indeed be looking to sunset POWER.
replyPowers not dead yet! IBM is still clinging to it and I can't blame them, it's a pretty good ISA
replyYep, I have said it for a good 20 years now.
replyPOWER/PowerPC is what happens when you take a brilliant design to execute it poorly. x86 is when you take a poor design and execute is brilliantly.
PPC could have any number of merits, the 2 nail in the coffin imho is that the community/implementations seems to have held on to a big-endian tradition whilst the mass of users/developers firmly shifted to little-endian when Apple went to x86 and that IBM didn't push it properly open in the 2005-2008 timeframe when PS3/Xbox360 were still relevant (OpenPower seems to have been created in 2013, after the creation of Risc-V and PS4/XboxOne going to x86).
replyUC Berkeley developed RISC-V, so no doubt their influence within the computer science academia sphere had something to do with it.
replyDunno, I think Risc-V's simplicity gave it the initial popularity rush rather than being from a certain institution (the institution perhaps gave it visibility, but it does have own merits and no idea if other archs from the time had those?), don't remembere exactly but iirc it was possible to implement with a ridiculously small amount of FPGA gates. Conversly heard some rumblings that it had parts t hat were unsuitable for scaling up but it seems to have gained enough momentum for people to engineer past stuff like that.
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