Twelve Years, One Bet on PowerPC: The Power Progress Community Story

Power Progress Community is a non-profit registered in Italy. Every member is a volunteer. Nobody gets paid except the electronic engineers they hire for specific funded tasks. Roberto describes their "business plan" as deliberately flexible: no crowdfunding countdown clock, no tight time-to-market pressure. Just an open donation campaign they can sustain indefinitely.

Their mission reads like something from the early free software movement. Solidarity-based knowledge. Freedom of choice. Technology designed to resist surveillance capitalism. Open hardware accessible to people far from the world of computing. They run coding workshops in Italian schools using repurposed old hardware. They partner with universities so students can design open hardware as thesis projects.

This is not a startup. It’s something older and stranger: a community running on passion.

The project centers on a PowerPC laptop and now a desktop, built around the NXP T2080. That’s a 64-bit Power Architecture chip with four dual-threaded e6500 cores and AltiVec vector support. The desktop version, called the Powerboard Tyche, comes in Micro ATX form factor with two PCIe x16 video card slots, two NVMe slots, and dual gigabit Ethernet.

Why PowerPC? Roberto puts it bluntly: "The PowerPC architecture design is newer than the other successful CPU architectures: x86 (1978), MIPS (1981), ARM (1983) — PowerPC (1991)." More to the point, since August 2019 the Power ISA became fully open. Developers can now design chips based on the royalty-free specification. The architecture that once ran inside every Mac, every PlayStation 3, and every Nintendo Wii is now genuinely free silicon.

The Powerboard Tyche schematics are published under the CERN Open Hardware Licence 1.2. PCB source files are on GitLab. They’re pursuing OSHWA certification. NXP itself agreed to let them publish the T2080 reference design as open hardware. That last part is not a given with any chip manufacturer.

The timeline is a story of persistence against everything that can go wrong in open hardware.

The project started in 2014 with a laptop idea. The formal association launched in 2016. By 2017 they were running their first crowdfunding campaign, partnering with ACube Systems for electrical engineering and with Slimbook (a Spanish Linux laptop maker) for the chassis. By 2022 they had physical prototypes.

Then came the hard part.

The prototype booted fine on NXP’s reference development kit. It refused to boot on their custom board. For eighteen months, from November 2023 to April 2025, the team tried every fix they could think of. CPLD updates. Firmware comparisons. Desoldering chips to isolate the fault. The board still wouldn’t boot.

In May 2025, after consulting their donor community, they made a call: pivot to a desktop first. Simpler enclosure. Lower production cost. Merged design based on the updated NXP T2080 reference board. In June 2025, NXP provided the latest T2080 RDB design. In October 2025, schematics were done. By March 2026, the PCB layout was complete.

That pivot isn’t a failure. It’s twelve years of knowing when to adapt without dropping the goal.

At Vates, the company behind the XCP-ng open source hypervisor, there’s an ongoing effort to port Xen to RISC-V, another open instruction set architecture that barely existed a decade ago. XCP-ng itself isn’t there yet. But the direction is clear: open silicon, community governance, computing that isn’t owned by a handful of companies. Watching Power Progress Community work through a decade of non-x86 hardware development feels like the same conversation.

There’s also an audience overlap worth naming. The open source sysadmin and virtualization world is full of people who came from Amiga, PowerPC Macs, and older non-x86 systems. People who remember when computing was more architecturally diverse, and think it should be again. If that’s you, or if you simply believe computing is healthier with more than two or three viable architectures, you probably want to know this project exists.

The Powerboard Tyche desktop PCB is done. The KiCad schematics are published. What’s left is funding physical prototypes. The campaign to cover prototyping and hardware testing needs roughly €3,500 to close. A small number relative to what’s already been invested in engineering and community time.

If you want to follow the project:

Roberto has presented at SFScon (the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano) every year since 2018. His 2025 talk covers the full story from laptop prototype struggles to the desktop pivot. The slides are available here.

Open hardware is slow work. Slower than software, slower than cloud services, slower than anything the venture capital cycle rewards. The Power Progress Community has been doing it anyway. Twelve years. Volunteer time. Donor funding. University partnerships. One prototype that wouldn’t boot, and the stubbornness to redesign rather than quit.

The PCB is done. I hope the prototype isn’t far behind.