Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan are forming the OpenPower Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM’s Power microprocessor architecture.

The consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology for next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.

Steve Mills (Senior vice president, and group executive, IBM Software & Systems): Combining our talents and assets around the Power architecture can greatly increase the rate of innovation throughout the industry. This type of ‘collaborative development’ model will change the way data center hardware is designed and deployed.

IBM is making Power hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making Power IP licensable to others.

The consortium will offer open-source Power firmware, as well as the software that controls basic chip functions.

As part of their initial collaboration within the consortium, NVIDIA and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA GPU and Power ecosystems.