Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and TYAN announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.
The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development and also makes POWER IP licensable to others.
Until now, IBM primarily used the POWER design in its own servers. “Under the OpenPOWER initiative, IBM will license the core intellectual property for our POWER technologies to other companies for use in designing servers employed in cloud data centers,” noted Tom Rosamilia, Senior VP, IBM Systems and Technology Group, in a recent blog.
“This new initiative makes it possible for cloud services and their technology providers to redesign the chips and circuit boards where computing is done—optimizing the interactions of microprocessors, memory, networking, data storage and other components,” writes Rosamilia in his blog.