PowerEL stands for Power Enterprise Linux, it originates from a requirement to have a fully free open source distribution for the IBM POWER platform.
The distribution takes it's origin from Enterprise Linux from Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Linux, and some Fedora and SuSE features.
While currently CentOS is available on for Power8, it doesn't have an optimized version and it follows it's upstream, RHEL, for all features, wich are limited.
PowerEL wants to make this process easier and more convenient providing more packages out of the box.
In making PowerEL more usable, an Intel CPU optimized version is also available.
The distribution takes it's origin from various Enterprise Linux distributions such as Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Fedora, SuSE, and others.
PowerEL has been optimized for specific CPU features, such as IBM Power8 or higher and Intel x86 AVX or higher, so it only works on cpu's with at least this set of features available.
It provides a very convenient way of more packages out of the box.
PowerEL uses the distro tag __pel__ and uses the same ABI as the rhel based systems, so you can use existing binaries on PowerEL.
PowerEL is a optimized version with specific cpu architecture optimzed compiled packages, so it only works on cpu's with at least this set of features available.
