From ComputerWorld: IBM has partnered with chip maker Xilinx to expand the use of IBM Power processors in servers, taking on Intel for a bigger slice of the data center market.
It's one of several announcements IBM is making Monday around its Open Power effort, which it launched last year to breathe new life into Power by licensing the design for use by other companies.
Penguin Computing and Italy's E4 Computer Engineering are each building high-performance computers based on Power chips. And IBM said it worked with Nvidia to include its GPUs in IBM's Watson supercomputer, another Power-based system.
It's a big change for IBM. The company used to be the exclusive maker of Power servers, and it used primarily IBM technologies. But with the Unix market in decline, IBM opened up the platform to let third parties build Power products.
Xilinx develops programmable chips known as FPGAs that can accelerate certain types of server workloads. The deal will allow IBM and its partners to incorporate Xilinx chips in Power systems, said Brad McCredie, an IBM fellow and president of the OpenPower Foundation.
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