Altera Corp. has joined the OpenPOWER Consortium that was founded in August 2013 to develop server, networking and GPU acceleration technology based on IBM's Power processor architecture.
Altera said it would collaborate with IBM and other OpenPOWER Foundation members to integrate IBM Power processors with FPGA-based acceleration for data center applications.
The original founders of OpenPOWER included: Google, IBM and Nvidia. These companies have now been joined by Altera, Fusion-io, Samsung, SK Hynix, Suzhou PowerCore and Xilinx. In addition to helping the POWER architecture to penetrate the server and networking sectors the group plans to open up POWER intellectual property – both hardware and software – to licensing by others in a similar manner to the business model used by ARM.
FPGAs can be used to produce energy-efficient configurable hardware accelerators and IBM and Altera have worked together to create a coherent interface between the POWER8 processor and Stratix V FPGAs. This also provides a roadmap to using Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs in next-generation POWER-based systems. The Altera software development kit for OpenCL allows developers to work with IBM Power processors and Altera FPGAs.
"The OpenPOWER Foundation will greatly increase the rate of innovation by giving developers an expanded and open set of technologies that will power the next generation of big data and cloud computing applications," said Jeff Waters, senior vice president of Altera’s military, industrial and computing division, in a statement.
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