IBM has agreed to license designs of its Power microprocessor architecture to other firms including Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan.
The company unveiled plans to form an open development alliance with the companies to expand the use of its architecture.
The alliance, dubbed OpenPOWER Consortium, aims to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology based on the chips for cloud data centres.
As part of their initial collaboration within the consortium, NVIDIA and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA GPU and POWER ecosystems.
IBM said the hardware and software will be available to open development and it will be licenseable to others.
IBM Software & Systems senior vice president and group executive Steve Mills said the founding members of the OpenPOWER Consortium represent the next generation in data-centre innovation.
"Developers now have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time. This type of ‘collaborative development’ model will change the way data centre hardware is designed and deployed," Mills said.
NVIDIA general manager of the Tesla accelerated computing business Sumit Gupta said: "The OpenPOWER Consortium brings together an ecosystem of hardware, system software, and enterprise applications that will provide powerful computing systems based on NVIDIA GPUs and POWER CPUs."
