OpenPOWER Foundation
OpenPOWER Logo
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| Formation | August 6, 2013 |
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| Founder | Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Tyan |
| Purpose | Member companies are enabled to customize POWER CPU processors and system platforms for optimization and innovation for their business needs. |
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Membership
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The foundation has over 250 members |
| Website | http://openpowerfoundation.org/ |
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power Architecture products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM is opening up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, like processor specifications, firmware and software and is offering this on a liberal license and they will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.
The goal stated is to enable the server vendor ecosystem to build their own customized server, networking and storage hardware for future data centers and cloud computing.
Power.org is still the governing body around the Power Architecture instruction set but specific implementations are now free to use under a liberal license granted by IBM. Processors based on IBM's IP can now be fabricated on any foundry and mixed with other hardware products of the integrator's choice.
IBM is using the word open to describe this project in three ways.
IBM is looking to offer the POWER8 chip technology and other future iterations under the OpenPOWER initiative but they are also making previous designs available for licensing. Partners are required to contribute intellectual property to the OpenPOWER Foundation to be able to gain high level status.
The POWER8 processor architecture incorporates facilities to integrate it more easily into custom designs. The generic memory controllers are designed to evolve with future technologies, and the new CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) expansion bus is built to integrate easily with external coprocessors like GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs. The CAPI technology has spawned an open technology group all of itself in October 2016. The OpenCAPI Consortium was founded by several OpenPOWER members together with Dell EMC, AMD and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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