  The forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes all require adaptive optics
systems for their successful operation. The real-time control for these systems
becomes computationally challenging, in part limited by the memory bandwidths
required for wavefront reconstruction. We investigate new POWER8 processor
technologies applied to the problem of real-time control for adaptive optics.
These processors have a large memory bandwidth, and we show that they are
suitable for operation of first-light ELT instrumentation, and propose some
potential real-time control system designs. A CPU-based real-time control
system significantly reduces complexity, improves maintainability, and leads to
increased longevity for the real-time control system.
