IBM today announced that Samsung Electronics has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation -- an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The OpenPOWER Foundation, announced in August 2013, intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of hyperscale and cloud data centers. The group makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to others.

Samsung will join Google, Tyan, Mellanox and Nvidia as members of the alliance.

It is not clear what exactly Samsung will do as a member of the OpenPower Consortium. TThe Korean company has dabbled with a number of chip architectures including x86 and ARM. The company makes mobile chips called Exynos based on ARM architecture that are used in its smartphones and is also making ARM-based server chips.