By Cat Yong
IBM shakes the dust off its Power processor architecture and seeks to formally define a clearer ecosystem, with an open development alliance for data centres called Openpower Consortium.
Initial members include Google, Nvidia, Tyan, Mellanox, and what happens is that IBM will license designs of the Power microprocessor architecture to them for use in designing servers deployed in cloud data centres.
According to IBM’s Systems and Technology Group SVP, Tom Rosamilla in a blog post, “Up until now, IBM primarily used the Power design in its own servers. This new initiative makes it possible for cloud services and their technology providers to redesign the chips and circuit boards where computing is done – optimising the interactions of microprocessors, memory, networking, data storage and other components.”
He cited one obvious immediate benefit, whereby data centre operators can now design servers that are custom-tuned to their applications, feeding increasing demand for custom-designed hardware rather than having to buy commodity hardware off the shelf.
Power vs. x86
One blog commenter had shared on the Web, “The industry needs alternative processors to execute a wide range of workloads. When comparing POWER to x86, POWER makes use of more cache, can address vastly more memory, can process 2x to 4x more threats, and offers superior virtualisation facilities.”
All this more computing power, makes it ideal for Big Data and cloud environments, the commenter called Joe Clabby, had said while further adding that having more than one architecture choice, besides just x86 is good for the industry.
Dr. Chang Cheong Swee, Director of Strategic Business and Marketing, at Heitech Managed Services also shared his thoughts about the Openpower Consortium with EITN, saying that it the collaboration is interesting and shows that IBM may realise they are missing the boat in CPU adoption.
Google as a consortium member is also interesting, and them being extremely innovative, “we should watch that space carefully.”
“However software can be notoriously CPU agnostic. So what is more important are the system design concepts that Google and IBM can achieve together to revolutionise system design to support cloud infrastructure.
“Interestingly they (IBM) are still keeping their jewel ie. the mainframe to themselves and not aggressively promoting that to cloud players as they should.”
In June this year, during another interview, Dr. Chang had shared that instead of cheap commodity servers, only mainframe servers could handle mission-critical/large databases workloads respectably.
“(IBM not promoting mainframe to cloud players)… that’s the real sad story,” Dr. Chang opined.
