> IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing
> The article mentions Nvidia favouring this development. Fair enough, but why?

"NVIDIA today announced that it plans to integrate a high-speed interconnect, called NVIDIA NVLink, into its future GPUs, enabling GPUs and CPUs to share data five to 12 times faster than they can today. [...] The new interconnect was co-developed with IBM, which is incorporating it in future versions of its POWER CPUs. [...] "NVLink enables fast data exchange between CPU and GPU, thereby improving data throughput through the computing system and overcoming a key bottleneck for accelerated computing today," said Bradley McCredie, vice president and IBM Fellow at IBM. "NVLink makes it easier for developers to modify high-performance and data analytics applications to take advantage of accelerated CPU-GPU systems. We think this technology represents another significant contribution to our OpenPOWER ecosystem." With NVLink technology tightly coupling IBM POWER CPUs with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, the POWER data center ecosystem will be able to fully leverage GPU acceleration for a diverse set of applications, such as high performance computing, data analytics and machine learning. [...] Today's GPUs are connected to x86-based CPUs through the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, which limits the GPU's ability to access the CPU memory system and is four- to five-times slower than typical CPU memory systems. PCIe is an even greater bottleneck between the GPU and IBM POWER CPUs, which have more bandwidth than x86 CPUs. As the NVLink interface will match the bandwidth of typical CPU memory systems, it will enable GPUs to access CPU memory at its full bandwidth. "
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/NVIDIA-Launches-World-s-First-High-Speed-GPU-Interconnect-Helping-Pave-the-Way-to-Exascale-Computin-ad6.aspx

It will be interesting to see how NVLink relates to POWER8's CAPI, which "is an overlay that will ride atop the PCI-Express 3.0 mechanicals to provide coherent memory addressing for CPUs and external coprocessors like Nvidia GPUs".