POWER

IBM has a series of high performance microprocessors called POWER followed by a number designating generation, i.e. POWER1, POWER2, POWER3 and so forth up to the latest POWER8. These processor have been used by IBM in their RS/6000, AS/400, pSeries, iSeries, System p, System i and Power Systems line of servers and supercomputers. They have also been used in data storage devices by IBM and by other server manufactures like Bull and Hitachi. The POWERn family of processors were developed in the late 1980s and are still in active development nearly 30 years later. In the beginning, they utilized the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), but that evolved into PowerPC in later generations and then to Power Architecture. Today, only the naming scheme remains the same; modern POWER processors do not use the POWER ISA.