We spend most of our time on x86 and ARM-based CPUs around these parts, but an IBM announcement today aims to add a third name to that list: the company will soon begin offering licenses for its venerable Power architecture to other companies, allowing them to build their own Power chips for "servers, networking, and storage devices."

A few other companies will be helping IBM in these efforts: Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and the Tyan Computer Corp will all apparently be promoting the technology as part of the OpenPower Consortium.

“The OpenPOWER Consortium brings together an ecosystem of hardware, system software, and enterprise applications that will provide powerful computing systems based on Nvidia GPUs and Power CPUs,” said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business at Nvidia, in a statement. IBM and Nvidia will be working together to make the Power architecture and Nvidia's CUDA platform play nicely with one another.

The first architecture to be available to licensees will be the upcoming Power8 architecture, a follow-up to the current Power7 chips. The OpenPower Consortium has its work cut out for it if it wants to reverse the architecture's decline—IBM reported that revenue from Power systems declined 25 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013. The architecture has also slowly been disappearing from consumer technology. Apple stopped using it in its Macs back in 2006, for example, and Microsoft's Xbox One will use an x86 chip from AMD rather than using a Power chip like the one in the Xbox 360.