According to IBM, the new server chips should offer up to 50 times faster processing than x86 servers. Other manufacturers receive licenses for hardware, software and intellectual property through the OpenPower Foundation. For this IBM has also presented a roadmap.

With Power8, IBM has introduced the next generation of its Power Systems architecture. The code name includes a range of processors and servers based on them, designed to accelerate big data analysis. Up to 50 times faster than commercially available x86 servers should be the processing, promises IBM.


According to the manufacturer, the Power8 chips for the upcoming server generation are only a square inch and are equipped with over 4 billion transistors and more than 17 kilometers of high-speed copper cables. IBM has invested about $ 2.4 billion in the three-year development.

"This is the first truly breakthrough in high-end server technology in decades, with radical technical innovations and complete support for an open server ecosystem that will seamlessly bring our customers into the world of huge data volumes and complexity," said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems and Technology Group. With the new power portfolio IBM wants to lay the "foundation stone" for the OpenPower Foundation, which works for free technologies in data centers.

The OpenPower Foundation, founded last year, now includes 25 manufacturers. These include Google, Micron, Nvidia and Samsung. Everyone is committed to sharing best practices and intellectual property. The consortium has now presented a first roadmap . This provides for the time being to open IBM's power hardware and software for free development and to make the underlying intellectual property available for licensing by other manufacturers.

For example, Nvidia has power solutions with its own GPU portfolio and acceleration framework for Java implemented . Hadoop analysis applications should be able to achieve up to eight times higher performance. The free power technology Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix want to use their storage and storage products. Even based on an open server model, Power8 also includes IBM's new Power Systems S-Class servers designed specifically for scale-out cloud computing environments.

At the OpenPower Summit in San Francisco, the foundation gave a first glimpse into their "white box server". Tyan's reference design uses a firmware and operating system developed by IBM, Google, and Canonical. IBM also wants to offer several Linux-focused developments. First, the group makes Canonical's Ubuntu server available on all Power8 systems. In addition, it recently introduced PowerKVM, a version of the Linux-integrated hypervisor Kernel-based Virtual Machine for its power architecture.

With the licensing of hardware, software and intellectual property, the OpenPower Foundation follows a similar approach to ARM. Its chip design is used in almost all mobile devices. However, the success is not preprogrammed. "It will take significant investment and time to build on the importance of ARM as an open architecture," said Patrick Moorhead, President and Chief Analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. Moorhead is also critical of IBM's promises of the new architecture's power: "Power8 seems to be very fast when combined with IBM software, but more data is needed to estimate its merits over Intel."

Intel told Intel itself: "IBM does a lot of internal testing and can claim anything it wants. We're not sure which applications used or how the tests were performed, but they do not seem to represent any real data center environment. "