Why OpenPOWER? Why Now?

To understand why the industry is transforming so quickly, it’s important to recognize the industry forces that brought us here. There are a number of developments that have become clear and that inspired this new strategic shift for IBM and for the industry:

1. Silicon is not enough. Moore’s Law predictions of performance improvements with each new generation of silicon have hit a physics wall and are no longer satisfying the price/performance ratios that clients and end users are looking for.
2. Different and growing workload demands. There is a tsunami of data flooding into organizations. In order to effectively manage the volume, address governance requirements, and get more value from data through analytics, data centers need to make adjustments to optimize for the new workload demands. This evolution is true today and will continue to change in the future. It is no longer satisfactory to take an all-purpose machine and deploy it for every workload. More specialization is required.
3. Changing consumption model of IT. The consumption model for many end users has become the cloud. Increasingly, users want to pay as they go and turn their IT services on and off like a utility. That has also led to cloud providers facing the need to specialize the hardware they deploy in their own data centers in order to effectively support this increasingly popular consumption model. Very large internet data centers and cloud service providers want to build their own, optimizing on price performance.
4. The continued momentum and maturity of the open source software ecosystem. Open source software has taken off. It has become a very mature ecosystem delivering at enterprise class and growing stronger every day. There is more and more reliance on the open software model.

These four trends led IBM to reflect on its own strategy. To address new challenges, IBM needed to lead the industry change. Today, the OpenPOWER Foundation is addressing that need by becoming the catalyst for open innovation that is necessary throughout the entire stack, from chip through software.

December 2014 is the first anniversary of the incorporation of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

We have worked very hard to get solutions and hardware reference boards available for the public launch which was announced in April 2014. By then, we had more than two dozen members. In July, we had contributed the POWER8 firmware to open source, providing a significant signal to the market that we are very serious about enabling innovation and optimization going all the way down to the hardware level. Today, we count more than 80 OpenPOWER members. We are growing globally and now have more than a dozen members in Europe and over 20 members in Asia.

IBM, Google, Samsung, Micron, NVIDIA .....75 more members

can you imagine POET as part of this?

http://openpowerfoundation.org/blogs/why-openpower-why-now/