With AMD’s fade out from the server market and the rapid decline of RISC systems, Intel has stood atop the server market all by itself. Its server share is well over 90% and growing as the top of the Xeon family gain mission critical features and it becomes a viable alternative to RISC in mission-critical scenarios.

But now there’s a new threat to Intel, and it comes from a firm that never went up against Intel in the past. IBM, through its OpenPOWER Foundation, could give Intel and its server OEMs a real fight in China, which is a massive server market.

IBM created OpenPOWER in late 2013 as an ARM-like effort to license its Power CPUs and motherboards in an effort to get more server vendors selling Power servers. Hey why not, that’s how the PC grew into ubiquity in the 1980s. IBM has rapidly gathered more than 100 partners, from Nvidia and Tian to Google and Ubuntu.

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