MOORE’S LAW, WHICH holds that processor advancement is derived from transistor scaling, is commonly believed to be dying as semiconductor design bumps up against the limits of physics. It’s debatable whether this is indeed true, but one thing is certain: Major computing shifts such as big data and cloud are placing heavy new demands on computing systems, and the tech industry’s traditional slow approach of moving to a new chip technology every couple of years is failing to keep up.
What’s needed is a new wave of post-silicon innovation to scale the servers in data centers so they can handle today’s unprecedented workloads. That’s much of the rationale for the creation of the OpenPOWER Foundation, a technology movement started by Google, IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan in 2013 and now backed by 111 companies and other organizations in 22 countries.Members gathered in San Jose this week for the first OpenPOWER Summit and unveiled 10 hardware advances that demonstrate OpenPOWER’s impact as a breeding ground for new technology, These include the first commercially available OpenPOWER server, the world’s first custom POWER chip and a new high-performance server initiating a roadmap that will culminate in the worlds most powerful systems to be delivered to the U.S. government.
It’s time to move beyond processor-centric design to a new paradigm that takes into account software, post-silicon materials and most importantly, the benefits of an open, collaborative ecosystem. No one company alone can tackle the new types of systems the world will need for the growing number of hyper-scale data centers. That’s why the OpenPOWER initiative makes IBM’s POWER hardware and software available to open development and allows POWER intellectual property to be licensed to others.
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