Chips clock up new approach

The common standard is the Power Architecture?
Exactly. Build around the common architecture so that you have all the hooks and tools. But it requires you to be open -- that is the key.

That must mean publishing lots of technical data for people to use. Are you saying you are going to make it easier for them to do that?
We are going to make it automatic. You could literally go out on the Web and download a design kit. We are talking about giving a level of data, essentially openness, that has never been available before and literally making it free. You literally go out on the Web and acquire this essentially for nothing.

In terms of chip design, rather than spending years, many man-years, of effort developing some kind of unusually efficient communications chip, you can go out on the Web and acquire it from somebody who is part of an ecosystem that has all of these intellectual-property elements already developed for it.

How does this make a chip design more open? I can see where it makes it easier for people to work with IBM. But IBM still controls the processor architecture.
This is as close as you can get without corrupting the ecosystem, which has to be stable for people to participate in it. That means that you have to define what I will call, for lack of a better word, interfaces. Unless everybody agrees how things talk to one another, you cannot develop something to work with what I am developing, because we have not agreed how we will talk to each other.

The architecture, therefore, must be protected, because that is what establishes how you communicate. So, yes, we have to lock down the architecture so that it cannot be randomly disrupted. Otherwise, imagine that somebody came along and altered the core architecture along with the core instruction set. It would invalidate all the prior intellectual property and destroy the ecosystem.

We have a unique situation we have to deal with. That does not mean, by the way, that we are not looking, for instance, at some sort of governance model. But it is very important that we protect the partnerships we are forming here, because there are people out there doing this sort of work, and the only way to make sure that we protect those partnerships is to absolutely ensure the integrity of the instruction set to which the people are designing their product. There is that constraint, but that is actually not a constraint for the purposes of hiding something. Rather, you simply cannot create an ecosystem without stability.