Crowd funding will help develop an ATX motherboard for IBM's Power8

For many years, x86 has dominated the computer market. Desktop PCs, laptops, workstations, servers - most devices are based on x86 architecture. Now this situation does not suit many, so it begins to change little by little. And for these changes are responsible not only large companies, but also ordinary enthusiasts of computer technology.

Now one of the companies that are part of the Open Power Foundation has initiated a project to create a motherboard that works with an IBM Power8 processor. According to representatives of this company, Raptor Engineering, systems based on such a board will support a number of Linux distributions. These include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. Little Endian and Big Endian are also available, but Fedora 22 is the only distribution that is compatible in this mode of operation.


Now this motherboard is already developed, although it is not implemented in hardware. The authors of the project plan to add support for the amount of RAM up to 256 GB, the board will have two x16 slots (both are compatible with Open CAPI ). Also, developers are talking about 10 SATA ports, eight USB 3.0 ports. Power consumption will not be low, because the radiator for the CPU, based on the characteristics, will dissipate 180W.
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In the case of creating a server based on the new board, you will have to think about coolers and active cooling. However, the performance of such a system will be quite high.

As for compatibility, the plans of developers support graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. If there is no need for a video card, then an integrated 2D solution can be used.



Despite the fact that many crowdfunding projects do not last long, it has every chance of becoming successful. Support for the Open Compute Project says a lot.

Two years ago, IBM introduced a new line of computing systems as part of the Open POWER initiative. Open POWER Technologies is an open set of hardware and software based on the IBM POWER architecture offered by the Open POWER Foundation consortium.

“The open business model and our approach within the framework of Open POWER will replace technology suppliers that offer proprietary private solutions created within a single company,” said Doug Balog, CEO of Power Systems, IBM Systems & Technology Group. . "The new technology will provide customers with a greater choice and help them quickly obtain valuable information for the subsequent solution of business problems."



Earlier this year, it became known that Google, as part of the Open ComputeProject (OCP) project, is developing a new type of server for data centers. An open specification server is created based on the IBM Power architecture with an IBM Power9 processor. According to the Google team, Power is great for self-development of its own hardware platform. Representatives of the American hosting provider Rackspace are also taking part in this project.