IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market

itwbennett writes With AMD's fade out from the server market and the rapid decline of RISC systems, Intel has stood atop the server market all by itself. But now IBM, through its OpenPOWER Foundation, could give Intel and its server OEMs a real fight in China, which is a massive server market. As the investor group Motley Fool notes, OpenPOWER is a threat to Intel in the Chinese server market because the government has been actively pushing homegrown solutions over foreign technology, and many of the Foundation members, like Tyan, are from China.

Comments

Power is bigger than you think

[nhtshot]

I work on PPC systems every day. I also use several. I'd wager that you do as well.

Have cable or satellite TV? 90% chance it's using a Power cpu. Drive a car with fuel injection? 65% chance your engine is run by Power, 90% chance something in the car is (ABS, nav, transmission).

It's been around a long time (30+ years), been 64 bit much longer than x86 or ARM, has good OS support and good compilers.

I work on and like ARM as well, but if IBM can make a value proposition in China with PPC, they actually have a chance at getting some market share outside embedded.

Re:Keyword: *SOFTWARE*

[Bert64]

The POWER architecture has been around longer than X64, the vast majority of linux software comes with source code and compiles fine on power (and arm, mips and anything else) so it doesn't matter what the underlying processor is. A lot of the software that doesn't come with source these days is java based, which will run just fine on power too.

Except for a small number of fairly niche apps, most linux based server loads will work fine on a power system.