In a bid to reinvigorate its POWER processor architecture, IBM this week announced a new development alliance called the Open POWER Consortium, with Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan as initial members.
Battling a diminishing server market overall, on top of competition from the Open Compute Project
and other industry initiatives, IBM hopes that OpenPOWER will build
advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology on
the POWER platform. The consortium makes POWER IP licensable to others
and for the first time will make POWER hardware and software available
to open development.
In doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented
customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of
computing workloads. IBM added variety to its own systems on Tuesday
the addition of new FLEX systems with POWER processors.
“The founding members of the OpenPOWER Consortium represent the next
generation in data-center innovation,” said Steve Mills, senior vice
president, and group executive, IBM Software & Systems. “Combining
our talents and assets around the POWER architecture can greatly
increase the rate of innovation throughout the industry. Developers now
have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the
first time. This type of ‘collaborative development’ model will change
the way data center hardware is designed and deployed.”
As a large maker of its own customized servers Google’s involvement
in the consortium signals an interesting twist in the processor
battleground. A year ago Intel noted
that Google was in the top five of server manufacturers that account
for 75 percent of Intel’s server chip revenues. There is nothing that
guarantees Google will build POWER-based systems, but with Google’s love
of open systems and drive to innovate its data centers, it is certainly
a possibility. NVIDIA and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA
GPU and POWER ecosystems.
“We are happy taking part in the OpenPOWER Consortium and its mission
to further accelerate the rate of innovation, performance and
efficiency for advanced data center solutions,” said Gilad Shainer, vice
president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Open source and
community development are key to enabling innovative computer platforms
and better serve the scalable and emerging applications in the areas of
high-performance, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Mellanox’s mission is to
provide the most efficient interconnect solution for all compute and CPU
architectures and deliver the highest return-on-investment to our
users.”
IBM says OpenPOWER is open to any firm that wants to innovate on the
POWER platform and participate in an open, collaborative effort.
By: John Rath
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