developerWorks: A Developer’s Guide to the PowerPC Architecture

“The PowerPC architecture and the application-level programming
model are common across all branches of the PowerPC architecture
family tree. For detailed information, see the product user’s
manuals available in the IBM PowerPC Web site technical
library…

“The PowerPC architecture is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer
(RISC) architecture, with over two hundred defined instructions.
PowerPC is RISC in that most instructions execute in a single cycle
and typically perform a single operation (such as loading storage
to a register, or storing a register to memory).

“The PowerPC architecture is broken up into three levels, or
‘books.’ By segmenting the architecture in this way, code
compatibility can be maintained across implementations while
leaving room for implementations to choose levels of complexity for
price/performances trade-offs…”

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