Talk:Frank Soltis

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I don't think Frank Soltis lead the original POWER design. He got involved with POWER/PowerPC when AS/400 switched to PowerPC. Guy Harris 22:36, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't believe he led the team, but I do think he was highly involved with it from the very early stages. What we currently call POWER was largely developed for the AS/400 and RS/6000, so it's pretty likely that Soltis had some heavy involvement in the designs... There's an article he wrote a while back about early PowerPC/POWER history that might be relevant here:

[1] -- uberpenguin 22:52, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

What we currently call POWER is derived in part from AS/400 (POWER4 and POWER5 implement the "Amazon" PowerPC/POWER2 superset), but I have the impression that POWER and, possibly, POWER2 were designed for the UNIX RISC workstation/server market, i.e. as SPARC/MIPS competitors, and that the AS/400 people weren't involved at that stage. Soltis' "Inside the AS/400" book indicates that the original plan for RISC AS/400's was to extend IMPI to 64 bits and add some RISC-style instructions, and IBM management pushed them into going with PowerPC. The Amazon project started in 1991, which was the beginning of his involvement with PowerPC, so, while he wasn't involved from the beginning of POWER or even PowerPC, he was definitely involved not too long after they got started (i.e., as soon as the AS/400 group decided to look at PowerPC). Guy Harris 00:51, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

That all seems to jive with what little I know about POWER history. I'll defer to you since you obviously have done more research on this than I have. -- uberpenguin 01:17, 25 December 2005 (UTC)