IBM opens its Power8 chip architecture

IBM has released details about its Power8 chip architecture to allow third parties to create their own designs based on the technology. The decision comes from the OpenPower Foundation, which includes Google and Samsung in addition to IBM.

The move means that the other members of the OpenPower Foundation will be able to license the technology from the Power8 chip architecture. They can use and adapt the technology to, for example, reduce power consumption and costs, fix bugs, and add software and hardware support. Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, Tyan, Micron and Samsung are among the 26 members of the foundation.

Tyan showed at the announcement, according to The Register, a reference server board with software from IBM, Google and Canonical. Nvidia will make its Cuda hardware acceleration technology suitable for the Power8 architecture. The result should be available at the end of this year. Nvidia’s NVLink interface should also come to the platform, and Xilinx and Altera are working on fpga accelerators for Power8 chips.

IBM hopes that the Power platform can grow into a sizable ecosystem and enter new markets in addition to the mainframes and high-end systems that IBM uses itself for. With this, the American group hopes to be able to compete better with Intel and the emerging ARM platform in servers. IBM’s Power System hardware is still the market leader in servers running on Unix, but that market is shrinking in size. Last year, sales of those systems fell by 31 percent, The New York writes