IBM's Latest Move Could Hurt Intel and AMD

IBM (NYSE: IBM) co-founded OpenPOWER, which open-sourced reference designs and firmware for systems powered by its Power CPUs, back in 2013. That move expanded IBM's base of Power CPU customers, undermined Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) dominance of the server market, and tethered more companies to its ecosystem.

IBM recently expanded that strategy by open-sourcing its Power CPU architecture alongside reference designs for its Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface and Open Memory Interface, which both maximize memory bandwidth between processors and attached devices.

Simply put, Big Blue is offering the world a blueprint for making their own CPUs. This could be great news for companies, especially Chinese ones, that want to reduce their dependence on proprietary technologies from other countries. But this could also be terrible news for Intel, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), and other chipmakers.

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Source Fool.com