New members:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42980.wss

""This is our first OpenPOWER partner that is doing full-blown microprocessor development from scratch," Brad McCredie, vice president and IBM Fellow for the IBM Systems & Technology Group, told POWER IT Pro. "They are taking our POWER8 technology, customizing it for the Chinese market, optimizing it, and they will be delivering it. It's exciting because we've now really started to expand our microprocessor ecosystem," he explained. [...] Suzhou will be actually building customized versions of the POWER8 chip itself, using either IBM's chip fabrication facility (fab), or by tooling up their own fabs to manufacture modified POWER8 chips directly."
http://poweritpro.com/news-amp-views/suzhou-powercore-start-using-ibm-power-tech-new-chip-design-china

"The startup, called Suzhou PowerCore, is a sister company to an existing Power chip licensee called China Core, or C*Core for short. The companies share the same CEO, Jiang Zheng, but they will operate separately. Suzhou PowerCore has joined IBM's OpenPower Consortium and is the first licensee of the intellectual property behind the Power8 processors [...]. The goal [...] is for Suzhou PowerCore to put together a chip development team and make customizations of the Power8 design that make it more suitable for servers and storage in the Chinese market. [...] At first, says McCredie, Suzhou PowerCore will make modest tweaks to the Power8 chips and use IBM's foundry in East Fishkill, New York to make its variants of the Power8 chip. Over the longer term, Suzhou PowerCore will make more substantial tweaks and will also have the ability to have its variants run through other foundries."
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh012714-story07.html

"Brad McCredie, vice president of Power Systems development within IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, tells EnterpriseTech that the arrangement with the OpenPower Consortium gives Suzhou PowerCore a license to the forthcoming Power8 processor, and will allow the startup to tweak the design as it sees fit for its customers as well as get the chips made in other foundries as it sees fit. Initially, Suzhou PowerCore will make modest changes to the Power8 chip and will use IBM’s chip plant in East Fishkill, New York to manufacture its own variants of the chips. The timeline for such modifications is unclear, but McCredie said that, generally speaking, it can take two years or more to design a chip and get them coming off the production line. Presumably it will not take that long for Suzhou PowerCore to get its first iteration of Power8 out the door, particularly given that IBM will have worked the kinks out of its 22 nanometer processes as it rolls out its own Power8 chips sometime around the middle of the year. The chip development teams of Suzhou PowerCore and IBM are working on the timelines and roadmaps for the Chinese Power chip right now. [...] The initial target markets for these PowerCore processors are in banking, communications, retail, and transportation – markets where IBM has made good money selling its own Power Systems machines for the past several years. Suzhou PowerCore expects to see its Power variants in server, storage, and networking gear eventually. Suzhou PowerCore is putting together the first chip development team that is working in conjunction with the OpenPower Consortium. [...] The Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology is given the task of building an ecosystem dedicated to Power software and hardware across China. Incidentally, Suzhou PowerCore is a sister company to China Core Technology, or C*Core for short, which is a licensee of the Freescale Semiconductor M-Core and IBM PowerPC instruction sets. C*Core licensed the PowerPC instruction set from IBM in 2010, and its C8000 and C9000 chips are aimed at the same embedded markets as the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 designs."
http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/01/21/chinese-startup-make-power8-server-chips/

"Mr. Zheng Jiang is the Chairman of the Board of Suzhou PowerCore Technology Co., Ltd.. He also serves as Chairman of the Board for C*Core Technology Co., Ltd."
http://openpowerfoundation.org/about-us/board-of-directors/


Edit: added more quotes

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 24.04.2014 - 21:56 ]