IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing 131
New submitter HAL11000 was the first of many to write with news that IBM and others have formed a new consortium to license the POWER architecture to third parties "IBM puts up POWER architecture for licensing and announces the OpenPower Consortium with Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Tyan."
Quoting El Reg: "The plan, according to McCredie, is to open up the intellectual property for the Power architecture and to allow customizations by licensees, just like ARM Holdings has done brilliantly with its ARM processors ... Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems. ... Tyan will presumably be working on alternative motherboards to the ones that IBM has manufactured for its own use." There are mentions of the POWER firmware being "open sourced," but it is unclear if that actually means Open Source or something more like the Open Group's definition of open (vendors only).
Nvidia... (Score:5, Funny)
Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems.
Nvidia hasn't quite figured out how to get their thermal energy per square centimeter to the level of a nuclear reactor, so I'm sure opening up the POWER series of chips has them quite excited on that front.