IBM tries ARM-style Licensing of PPC Processors

[minator]

AFAIK this isn't about PPC.  PPCs have been licensable for years.

This is about POWER processors.  These have never been openly licensed.
These are high end server processors, not embedded chips (though they probably are used in some very specialist IBM embedded stuff).

IBM has been pushing POWER prices down recently to compete with Intel.
Intel are going to get a lot of competition soon from ARM so Intel will want to push upwards into high end systems.  This is where IBM live and they're fighting back.

[minator]

Of course ARM dwarfs all of them, with an estimated 3 billion cpu's likely to get shipped this year...

That would be quite a disappointment given that there were nearly 2.4 billion shipped in the last quarter alone!