IBM’s announcement this month of SuperVessel, a free cloud for OpenPower research, was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was made at the OpenPower Foundation Summit, held the week before last in China’s capital, Beijing. This, in itself, was important. Sales of IBM Power Systems all but dried up in China after Edward […]
OpenPower conference bears East Asian fruit
OpenPower Foundation members showed off some potentially game-changing new hardware at their first full conference in San Jose, California, last week. The Open Power consortium was formed by IBM in August, 2013, in an attempt to create a renewed ecosystem around its Power processor technology. From four original partners, the group has grown to 110 […]
OpenPower looking strong for 2015 with 80th member
IBM’s OpenPower Foundation appears to be going from strength to strength as it heads into 2015. The consortium Big Blue formed around its Power processor technology found its 80th member last week in the form of major cloud vendor Rackspace. The Texas-based company has data centres around the world and has apparently been investigating Power […]
Power8 gets more acceleration, new compilers
Altera has unveiled new accelerators for Power chips and Nvidia is to introduce compilers to run x86 Linux apps on the processors more easily. Silicon Valley-based Altera makes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used to speed up processing (pictured). It announced support for IBM’s OpenPower Foundation in November, 2013, and is listed as a […]
IBM & Nvidea team with top German HPC centre
As well as landing a mega deal from the U.S. government, IBM and Nvidia have teamed up with Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Together, they plan to set up the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre to “advance the creation and optimisation of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPower-compatible systems”. The Centre will bring experts together from the […]
Opinion: IBM needs more focus on Power
Call me biased, but isn’t one of the primary messages from IBM’s latest disappointing quarterly figures simply that it needs to sell more Power Systems? Big Blue certainly made no bones about fingering its Systems and Technology server and storage division for some of its failings in its earnings announcement on Monday. Revenues from Power […]
GlobalFoundries gets $1.5 billion to make Power chips
IBM is to sell its processor manufacturing arm to GlobalFoundries. Big Blue announced today that it will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take its chip factories in New York and Vermont off its hands. GlobalFoundries will be IBM’s exclusive provider for 22 nanometer, 14nm and 10nm processor chipsets for the next 10 years. Plus GlobalFoundries […]
Tyan’s Palmetto is first non-IBM Power system
The first non-IBM Power processor-based servers will hit the streets later this month, courtesy of Taiwanese manufacturer Tyan. The announcement came yesterday despite rumours that such hardware, promised as a result of collaboration within IBM’s OpenPOWER Foundation industry consortium, would not appear until well into 2015. There were doubts in some quarters that it would […]
Is IBM back in the game in China?
IBM has signed a number of deals that point to an improvement in its fortunes in China. Big Blue looked like it was dealt a mortal blow in the world’s second biggest economy after being caught in the cross-fire caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations last year. But now local server manufacturer Inspur will use DB2 […]
IBM’s processor sell-off may have stalled
IBM may not be selling its processor businesses to GlobalFoundries after all, according to a Bloomberg report. On Friday, the American news agency posted a story that said IBM had walked away from the negotiating table because GlobalFoundries’ offer for its chip operation was too small. Neither party had been willing to comment either way. […]