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 happen at all.

Tyan was a founding member of the OpenPOWER Foundation when it was launched in August, 2013. It is a subsidiary of Taiwan’s MiTAC International Corp.

Its new machine, codenamed Palmetto, is called the OpenPOWER Customer Reference System, or, more specifically, the TYAN GN70-BP010 (pictured). The “customer reference” moniker would appear to label the server as a kind of test machine, so it will be interesting to see how many units is Tyan preparing to sell.

Pricing, however, is clear, at $2,753 (around £1,700) with 4GB of memory and a single 500GB 3.5in hard drive.

Spec-wise, the GN70-BP010 is a is a 2U rack-mount system based on a single Power8 Turismo processor. It has four slots for DDR3 memory Dimms, up to eight 2.5in or 3.5in hot-swap drives, twin Gigabit Ethernet ports and two PCI Express slots.

Launching the new machine, Albert Mu, vice president of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation’s Tyan business unit, said: ” As the first commercialised customer reference system provided from an official member from the OpenPOWER ecosystem, the TYAN GN70-BP010 is based on the Power8 Architecture and follows the OpenPOWER Foundation’s design concept.”

The recommended OS for the Palmetto is Ubuntu Linux. We’ll have more details as we get them, including whether or not there are plans for the new hardware to run AIX or even IBM i.