We announced during for the Open Innovation Summit in San Francisco last month and it’s now official: the first IBM-based POWER8 systems are now commercially available, along with a suite of software tools to facilitate the migration of x86 applications.

After more than three years of development and a $ 2.4 Bn investment, the series includes a variety of blade servers including 2U (S812L, S822 and S822L), 4U (S814/S824) or tower (S814) models. The common denominator for all these references is P8’s 22 nm first iteration, with up to 12 cores and frequencies between 2.5 and 5 GHz. Unsurprisingly, this kind of equipment, more classic IT-oriented, is primarily aimed at cloud services operators and large corporations. This is why it supports AIX and IBM i in addition to Linux.

On the HPC side, the announcement marks the beginning of the countdown. Within 18 months, the members of the OpenPOWER consortium should deliver hardware and software building blocks designed to put an end to Intel’s hegemony, including NVIDIA’s promising NVLink interconnect. In the meantime, the pace and level of adoption of the above servers should give the community some pointers about the real potential of the initiative…