Overview of the OpenPower Foundation, Alliance, and Ecosystem

IBM Power once dominated the core server market, but shifting customer demands toward open, collaborative, and software‑defined solutions led IBM to launch the OpenPower Alliance, enabling partners to build custom servers on the Power architecture and moving from a closed to an open (though not open‑source) model.

The OpenPower Foundation, established on August 6, 2013, opened processor specifications, firmware, and software under a free license, fostering a collaborative development model with server vendors to create an ecosystem for custom data‑center and cloud servers, networking, and storage.

Power.org, founded in 2004 with 15 member companies, manages the Power Architecture ISA; under IBM’s free license the IP can be used by any foundry and combined with other hardware components.

IBM describes the OpenPower project through three pillars: open licensing of microprocessor technology, a collaborative business model where participants share technology and innovation, and leveraging open‑source software such as Linux.

Early OpenPower products were IBM System p servers using POWER5 CPUs that ran 64‑bit Linux; they lacked an AIX license and were part of the eServer line before being merged into the Power Systems portfolio.

In 2013 the OpenPower Foundation was created to promote high‑end Power8 and later processors, distinct from the product line itself.

Under the OpenPower plan, IBM provides POWER8 technology to partners who contribute intellectual property, granting them higher membership status; the foundation offers platinum, gold, silver, and academic membership tiers with varying fees.

POWER8 supports custom integration, a universal memory controller, and the CAPI bus for GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs; NVIDIA’s NVLink technology is tightly integrated. The platform includes firmware, KVM virtualization, and a little‑endian Linux OS, with open‑source releases hosted on GitHub.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and early versions of FreeBSD have added support for Power8.

The OpenPower community has expanded to include founding members such as Google, Tyan, NVIDIA, and Mellanox, with later entrants like Altera, PowerCore, and many others; by 2016 the foundation counted over 250 members.

At the 2018 OpenPower summit, companies like Lenovo, Supermicro, Inventec, Rackspace, and Gigabyte announced Power9 servers and 87 hardware innovations. Enterprises such as Uber, PayPal, and Alibaba Cloud are leveraging OpenPower‑based servers for AI and big‑data workloads, benefiting from technologies like NVLink, OpenCAPI, PCIe Gen4, and specialized AI and analytics software.

Relevant links: Hardware Reveal Flyer 2018 , OpenPower Foundation Membership .