OpenPOWER opens further

Ten years ago, power and its powerpc relatives had certainly faded a good deal outside of IBM hardware, but they weren't very dead. It was a much more relevant architecture than Sparc still for many purposes, and a fully open architecture with decent performance available in a variety of energy cost points would have been compelling for a bunch of uses, even if just for applications where arm licensing is a significant cost.

At this point, power is pretty much used only in IBM servers. The CPU arch for IBM servers being open gives me what, the potential for Hitachi to fab cpus for IBM servers? That might make that slice of big iron a bit more palatable, but it doesn't seem like a big impact potential is there.