A week and a half after IBM Cloud and Smart Infrastructure head Deepak Advani took to the stage at Red Hat Summit to detail how big of a role open source technology has in his company’s long-term vision, Big Blue is putting its money where its mouth is with the introduction of new Power systems that harness the power of the community throughout the entire stack, all the way down to the chip level.

The culmination of $2.4 billion in funding and three years of development, the vendor’s latest generation high-end rack machines are based on the POWER8, a sliver of silicon measuring just one square inch that packs 4 billion microscopic transistors and more than 11 miles of copper wiring. What’s unique about the processor, besides the sheer amount of horsepower crammed into such a small form factor, is the fact that IBM is making the upstream specification available to the broader industry through the OpenPOWER Foundation. That includes both partners and competitors, which is the whole point of the organization, an consortium modeled after Facebook’s Open Compute Project that the vendor launched last year with Google, NVIDIA, Mellanox and specialized hardware firm Tyan to encourage the development of custom architectures using its technologies.

Although eager to spread the word about its speedy new chip, Big Blue is keeping a tight lid on the systems until the Open Innovation Summit in San Francisco next week. But it did disclose that the launch lineup consists of five models which will be available in 1- and 2-socket and 2U and 4U configurations at a starting price of $7,973.  The vendor says that the machines can run analytical workloads up to 50 times faster than x86-based alternatives such as the low-end System x and BladeCenter product families it unloaded onto Lenovo as part the $2.3 billion sale of its low-level server business back in January.

Also notable, two of the systems set to make their debut next week will run Linux exclusively, a choice that further underscores IBM’s aggressive focus on open source software and the free operating system in particular. The company has a staunch supporter of the platform since 2000, when it officially embraced it as a key component of its systems strategy. Then-CEO Louis Gerstner followed up the move with a $1 billion investment that put Linux on CIOs’ radar and ultimately helped make the OS  ubiquitous in the data center. Last September, Big Blue committed another $1 billion to promote the creation of Linux applications on Power systems.

Thus far, Power users only had two commercial flavors (Red Hat and SUSE) to choose from, but that is changing with the new POWER8-based series, as it adds support for Canonical’s freshly released open source Ubuntu Server 14.05 LS. The machines are also interoperable with the distributor’s OpenStack platform and Juju service orchestration tool, which is complemented by a new version of the free KVM Linux hypervisor that has been optimized to work in Power environments.

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