Google, Mellanox, Nvidia and Tyan join IBM to form the OpenPOWER Consortium-- an open development alliance with plans to boost the popularity of POWER architecture by licensing Big Blue server hardware and firmware.
The alliance makes POWER hardware and software open source and allows other vendors to license POWER IP. In other words, IBM wants more datacentre customers to develop own POWER-based hardware, allowing it to take over a bigger slice of the datacentre market.
"Developers now have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time," IBM says. "This type of "collaborative development" model will change the way data center hardware is designed and deployed.” Read more...