Industry Expert Blogs

Anyone who still doubted that large datacenters are serious about inducing a competitive CPU field certainly got a wakeup call last week when Rackspace and Google announced that they are teaming up to enable their use of OpenPower when IBM releases their POWER9 chip in late 2017. Some have questioned whether this means ARM is now far behind, and one does have to wonder how this could impact Qualcomm and Broadcom’s ARM Server SOC plans. Let’s take a look at how this might play out.

First, these pronouncements do not amount to an endorsement of OpenPower at the expense of other alternatives, namely ARM. To the contrary, they amount to an endorsement of HAVING CHOICE. This is really great news, showing that some of the industry’s titans are already preparing their software for alternative architectures and are willing to invest significant efforts to enable choice.

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