Roberto Innocenti

In 2018 we presented at SFScon the block diagram of the project of our Open Hardware Notebook, after 3 years, in this edition the prototypes are around the corner… We present the Beta tester and Supporters program to produce a first small number of pieces of this notebook useful for GNU/Linux distributions to other OS and for anyone interested in getting their hands on it in preview.

This notebook is designed around GNU/Linux and is a concrete example of a complex Open Hardware electronic design. What’s more is a user driven design that is a plus.

The game has changed, FOSS OS and software is everywhere running on every CPU architectures and devices. Even mass consumer computer manufactures are producing with "new" CPU architectures. In 2020 thanks to the Open Power ISA have opened Power Architecture new Chips. It's the right time to have (back) Power Architecture for Open Source Hardware lovers, in educations, makers, hobbyists, consumers and gaming electronics. We will see concretes present projects and future options.

This year IBM released the A2I,A20 POWER processor cores design (softcore) licensed with Creative Common CC-BY 4.0 and associated FPGA environment. In 2019 IBM opened the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) so now others chip manufactures could produce Power Architecture royalty-free chips . We discover how the FOSS have permitted to manufacturers to adopt newer CPU Architectures and how will be redesigned electronic adopting Open Source Hardware for motherboard and CPU design. We will focus on Open Hardware concretes projects around Power Architecture like the Power Architecture Notebook project, Libre-SOC project ( aims to deliver a physical POWER compliant SOC with a CPU, GPU, VPU, and DDR controller and others projects of cheap Power Architecture motherboards.

This year IBM released the A2I POWER processor core design and associated FPGA environment. In 2019 IBM opened the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The Power Progress Community released the PCB of the Notebook Motherboard based on Power Architecture with Cern Open Hardware License. Libre-SOC is a software-hardware project that aims to deliver a physical POWER compliant SOC that comes complete with a CPU, GPU, VPU, and DDR controller. We will discover these concrete projects.