IBM 和 Google 等公司组建的 OpenPower 联盟？新云东方这类企业在制造销售power处理器架构的服务器销路如何

《华尔街日报》网络版今天发表题为《IBM组建联盟挑战因特尔(IBM Gets Allies to Chip Away at Intel)》的文章称，IBM 已与谷歌 (Google) 和英伟达等公司组建OpenPower联盟，共同推进Power架构技术的发展，在服务器、网络和存储设备领域向英特尔发起挑战。 via IBM组建联盟挑战英特尔：用Power对抗x⑧⑥|IBM|英特尔

这个问题我问了下自己的导师Dr.Walker. 其回复如下:

IBM is trying to find a market for the POWER architecture. Since Apple dropped the PowerPC, and IBM lost the game console market, the primary uses of the POWER architecture have been in IBM servers (pSeries), and automotive engine controllers (from Freescale). They formed a consortium power.org many years ago. What is new is trying to get Google and Nvidia on board with a focus on data center processors. I am not sure if anything wil come from this collaboration. Nvidia is trying to sell ARM-based Tegra processors, but was kind of late to that market, so has had only modest success. Google builds their own boards, and doesn’t really care what processor they use – they just want cheap, energy efficient, fast. They have hired chip designers, so maybe they will make their own processors, but I am fairly dubious about that. They own a lot of processors, but I don’t think they have the internal volume in processors for that to make sense. Facebook is trying to get a consortium around a standard data center processor module instead.

So essentially IBM is trying to push POWER into warehouse scale data centers, since an increasing fraction of that market (e.g. Facebook, Google, Amazon) build their own systems, rather than buying from IBM, HP, etc. So IBM would really be in competition with ARM (and companies using it, such as AMD and Nvidia) and Intel.

I don’t see IBM hiring in their chip design business. They have been trying to sell their fabs for several years to Global Foundries (Global wants IBM to give them $②B to take the old fabs), and their hardware business has shrunk by ③⓪% this past year. IBM needs POWER and zSeries processors to sustain its legacy systems, but it will be increasingly difficult to afford the CPU design effort with a shrinking volume of chips. So I expect that they will start to use smaller design teams depending on more automation and less optimization in future chip generations, with more sharing between POWER and zSeries (they share already).

IBM has a track record of selling off underperforming hardware businesses. They sold laptops to Lenovo. Then Intel-based small and midrange servers. Disks were sold to Hitachi, and printers spun off as Lexmark. The only hardware business they still retain is high-end servers, including supercomputers (e.g. BlueGene) and a lot of that is legacy business – corporate mainframes and database servers. They have built special data analytics servers, but that is a new business.

我个人还是看好的，IBM 小型机目前国内①些特定的客户，银行，政府，运营商等 还是有①定市场的。X⑧⑥短时间还是替代不了。受国产化影响，IBM 慢慢在中国弱势，个人觉得类似新云东方 这样的厂家还是 很有机会的。