---
title: Instruction Set Architecture Compliance Definition
group: compliance
publicreview: false
tags:
  - instructionsetarchitecture
  - isa
  - powerisa
  - cores
  - power8
  - power9
date: 2020-05-07
draft: false
---

The OpenPOWER ISA Compliance Definition defines the test suite requirements to demonstrate OpenPOWER ISA Profile compliance for POWER systems.
The purpose of the OpenPOWER ISA Profile Compliance Test Harness and Test Suite (TH/TS) Specification,
is to provide the test suite requirements to be able to demonstrate OpenPOWER ISA Profile compliance for POWER based systems.  

The input to this specification is the IBM POWER ISA, implementation of all of the ISA is required, there are no optional sections.  

The testing of a processor implementation’s compliance against the Power ISA – OpenPOWER Profile ensures
that software shown to execute properly on one compliant processor implementation will execute properly on
a different also compliant processor implementation.
The testing is not intended to show that the processor implementation under test is robust 
under all possible operating conditions, inputs, or event time interactions.
It is intend to show that the processor implementation under test implemented the ISA
as specified and the ISA specification was interpreted by the processor developers as intended by the ISA specification author.

This document is a Standard Track, Work Group Specification work product owned by the Compliance Workgroup and
handled in compliance with the requirements outlined in the OpenPOWER Foundation Work Group (WG) Process document.
Comments, questions, etc. can be submitted to the public mailing list for this document at openpower-isa-thts@mailinglist.openpowerfoundation.org.