The IBM Impact conference kicked off this week at Las Vegas’ The Venetian Resort. SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, hosted by John Furrier and Paul Gillin, welcomed the General Manager for Power Systems at IBM, Doug Balog, to discuss the new Power8 processor, which appears to be IBM’s shot across the bow of Intel’s current dominance in the marketplace.

The Power8 processor is, according to Sebastian Anthony with ExtremeTech,  “monstrously powerful.” And it makes sense that it would be as it measures in at 650 square millimeters, or roughly the size of your palm. Anthony contends this chip, with its greater than 4 billion transistors is “probably the most powerful CPU ever built.”

As Furrier noted, it certainly appears IBM is straddling the right fault lines as the industry is experiencing a tectonic shift in areas like analytics, mobile, social and Cloud computing to name just a few. One thing IBM is doing right is really embracing the open source community moving forward.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

 .

 .

“Every company is looking for the best company to solve the issue they have. But the best technology doesn’t necessarily mean it comes from one company,” Balog explained. “[Clients] are all incredibly uncomfortable with setting the innovation agenda. With our Open Power Foundation, we’ve said, ‘You know what? We completely agree.’ IBM cannot be the company that thinks we can do it all.” This is a startling revelation coming from a company that has long been known as fiercely protective of their proprietary hardware solutions.

The IBM Open Power Foundation, launched with only five members, has blossomed to 26 members and, according to Balog, is growing daily. “In fact, in San Francisco last week, we were signing partners such as Canonical, which brought Ubuntu to market, and Rice University, which is working with the Texas Medical Center,” he said.

“Nevertheless, when you look at the Open Power Foundation, there’s one company that stands out and that is Google,” stated Gillin. “How important is Google’s endorsement?” he asked.

“Gordon Mackean is from Google. He’s responsible for their infrastructure. He’s also the Chairman for the Open Power Foundation. They’ve had a very strong hand in setting the direction for where the Open Power Foundation goes, so far,” Balog responded. “They play a strong role.”

Wrapping up the interview, Furrier asked Balog to share his reasoning on why he feels the IBM Impact conference is important.

“The reason we’re at this show and announcing the new Power Systems is back to the point of the changes we see in the marketplace. Every mobile transaction, every reach to the Cloud, every social post, it drives data. And data does ultimately rely on the infrastructure. That’s why we are investing in the areas of data, cloud and being the most open server platform in the marketplace,” Balog concluded.

photo credit: Defence Images via photopin cc