[Nelson69]

I tend to agree, I think if IBM were to release some core designs to go with it then they could potentially spur something interesting.

I really see it two ways, the fact that Talos has real hardware that isn't priced up in the stratosphere (it's not cheap, but it's not insane) and then the ISA being opened. Those are giant steps for a company like IBM. At the same time, as big as those steps are for IBM, they seem like pretty small steps in terms of taking on the world with this stuff.

Throw in something like the full G5 design? We might be talking about something different.

[orbifold]

They are more than willing to hand out old designs to university groups (you just have to ask nicely). In fact someone in our group spend his PhD developing a custom embedded Power processor in 65nm just to be told that when he was hired by IBM (whether he would have gotten the job is a different question of course).