IBM said Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company and Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology, two Chinese organizations, will join the OpenPOWER Foundation.
Suzhou PowerCore will use IBM’s POWER architecture to provide customized chip design solutions to push server innovation in such areas as Big Data, cloud computing and next generation data centers, said IBM in a statement.
OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture, aims to enable advance server, networking, storage and acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next generation and cloud data centers.
The foundation makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to other manufacturers, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.
Suzhou PowerCore plans to license IBM’s POWER architecture, intellectual property related to POWER8 and chip design tools to develop and market processors for servers in China. The Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology will promote and help build an ecosystem for POWER development in Jiangsu Province and throughout China.
Suzhou PowerCore is working with Chinese chip design teams.
In May 2013, IBM opened its first Linux development center for POWER server technology in Beijing. Since then, more than 550 new applications have been created for the POWER architecture with the center’s help. POWER-based servers run some of the world’s most popular Web-commerce sites and can be found at work in major enterprises around the world.