The external components will be connected via

To make the chip faster, IBM has turned to a more advanced manufacturing process, increased the clock speed and added more cache memory, but perhaps the biggest change heralded by the Power8 cannot be found in the specifications.

After years of restricting Power processors to its servers, IBM is throwing open the gates and will be licensing Power8 to third-party chip and component makers.

IBM has moved away from some proprietary board-level technologies with Power8, and has included a connector so third-party graphics processors and other components can be easily linked to the chip.IBM recently announced it would open up the Power chip intellectual property and license it to third parties including Google.women shoes manufacturer The IP is being opened up as part of a development alliance called OpenPower Consortium, and one of the members is Nvidia, which is expected to develop a graphics processor that connects to the Power8 processor. Tyan is building a server based on the Power8 chip.

The previous Power7 chip was perhaps best known for its place in the Watson supercomputer, which famously competed against humans on the U.S. TV quiz show "Jeopardy" -- and won.

Watson also found use in areas like health care and the financial sector. Beyond IBM's traditional market of Unix servers, the Power8 chip is also designed for areas like cloud and big data."Big data is something that is driving ," said Jeff Stuecheli, chief nest architect of IBM Power Systems in the Systems and Technology Development Group. "You have big data, you need big performance."The Power8 chip will support up to 1TB of DRAM in initial server configurations and will offer 230GB per second of sustained memory bandwidth, Stuecheli said.

The external components will be connected via the CAPI port. The CAPI port interfaces with the PCI-Express slot for external components such as GPUs or FPGAs to communicate with the chip.The chip is made using the 22-nanometer process. Power8 has a large cache memory, including 512KB of cache per core, 96MB of on-chip shared L3 and 128MB off-chip L4 cache. The L4 cache was removed in Power7, but it comes back with Power8. Each processor core will also support eight threads, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously.IBM wants to share the Power8 technology with a larger ecosystem, and is also working on an open software stack for the processor, Steucheli said. A lot of the tools will help develop high-performance applications.

 "This industry-first solution enables VMware virtualized data centers to benefit from flash-level performance while retaining network accessibility and fault tolerance using our 40GbE NIC interconnection to handle the server-to-server enterprise storage loads," said Motti Beck, Director of Enterprise Market Development for Mellanox Technologies. "We are very pleased to extend our collaboration with OCZ enabling virtualized environments to benefit from highly available, low latency SAN-less deployments."

"The combination of on-host flash with our VXL Software enables lower TCO in the software-defined data center by increasing VM density and server utilization," said Dr. Allon Cohen, Vice President of Software and Solutions for OCZ Technology. "Our collaboration with Mellanox to enable lower latency and increased bandwidth connectivity between servers enables these environments to enjoy the TCO and performance gain improvements while retaining all of the benefits of a SAN-less, software-defined deployment without compromises or limitations."

The Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN 40/56GbE NIC delivers high-bandwidth and industry-leading Ethernet connectivity for performance-driven server and storage applications in enterprise data centers, High Performance Computing (HPC) and embedded environments. Its low power and application acceleration for converged I/O infrastructures eliminate the need for multiple Ethernet connections to the server while maximizing server and storage performance throughput. This results in reduced operating costs and network complexity.
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