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AIM alliance

The AIM alliance, also known as the PowerPC alliance, was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Its goal was to create an industry-wide open-standard computing platform based on the POWER instruction set architecture.[1][2]: 69  It was intended to solve legacy problems, future-proof the industry, and compete with Microsoft's monopoly and the Wintel duopoly. The alliance yielded the launch of Taligent, Kaleida Labs, the PowerPC CPU family, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) hardware platform standard, and Apple's Power Macintosh computer line.

Not to be confused with AOL Instant Messenger.

Company type

October 2, 1991 (October 2, 1991)

c. 2006

Dissolved

United States

Legacy[edit]

The PowerPC is the clearest intended success that came out of the AIM alliance.[2]: 48  From 1994 to 2006, Apple used PowerPC chips in almost every Macintosh. PowerPC also has had success in the embedded market, and in video game consoles: GameCube, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.


After being reinstated into the AIM alliance, Motorola helped IBM to design some laptop PowerPC chips with IBM's manufacturing. In 2004, Motorola spun off its Semiconductor production as Freescale Semiconductor, and left the AIM alliance completely, leaving IBM and Apple in the alliance. Freescale continued to help IBM design PowerPC chips until Freescale was acquired and absorbed by NXP Semiconductors in 2015.


Apple transitioned entirely to Intel CPUs in 2006, due to eventual disappointment with the direction and performance of PowerPC development as of the G5 model, especially in the fast-growing laptop market. This was seen as the end of the AIM alliance as that left IBM as the sole user of PowerPC.


Taligent was launched from the original AIM alliance, based originally on Apple's Pink operating system. From Taligent came the CommonPoint application framework and many global contributions to internationalization and compilers, in the form of Java Development Kit 1.1, VisualAge C++, and the International Components for Unicode open source project.


Power.org was founded in 2004 by IBM and fifteen partners with intent to develop, enable, and promote Power Architecture technology, such as PowerPC, POWER, and software applications.


The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. It has more than 250 members. In 2019, IBM announced its open-sourcing of the Power ISA.[15][16]

Advanced Computing Environment

Advanced RISC Computing

Charles R. Moore and Russel C. Stanphill (June 1994). (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 37 (6): 25–27. doi:10.1145/175208.175210. S2CID 5513096. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 27, 2009. Retrieved November 13, 2016.

"The PowerPC Alliance"