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IBM’s chip business needs help. So the company has opened up the technology of its Power microprocessors, inviting others to modify and manufacture Power-based designs pretty much as they see fit. This open, liberal licensing initiative is conducted under the auspices of the OpenPower Foundation, which was incorporated in December.

The foundation now has two dozen members in addition to IBM, including Google, Samsung, Nvidia, Mellanox and Tyan. On Wednesday, IBM and the foundation are announcing the first fruits of that collaboration – server computers based on IBM’s new Power8 chip technology. The chips, experts say, are unusually fast, powerful and tuned for handling vast amounts of data.

IBM and Google are the key strategic players in the foundation. IBM’s Power systems hold the largest share of the market for server computers running the Unix operating system. But the Unix server market is withering. Sales of IBM’s Power systems fell 31 percent last year.

“For the Power technology to survive, IBM has to do this,” said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, a research firm. “It needs to find new markets for Power.”

The new market strategy is to become an attractive hardware home for Linux, the operating system of choice in Internet-era data centers. Linux typically runs on industry-standard chips, mainly produced by Intel but also Advanced Micro Devices.

“We really wanted to give people an alternative to Linux on Intel,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president in charge of I.B.M.’s hardware business, a position he assumed last August.

IBM’s decision to open up its chip technology, Mr. Rosamilia said, takes a page from the playbook of ARM, whose open licensing policy has helped make its low-power processors a leader in the smartphone and tablet markets.

Gordon MacKean, who leads Google’s hardware teams, is the chairman of the OpenPower Foundation. In an interview, Mr. MacKean said opening up the Power technology allowed many groups to fine-tune it, potentially driving down the price and improving the performance of data-intensive computing.

Mr. MacKean declined to discuss Google’s own plans for using Power-based technology in its many massive data centers. But analysts say the embrace of Power has two crucial advantages for Google. First, the Internet giant builds its own data centers and tweaks the technology in its server computers, and the licensing regime in the Power foundation is hacker-friendly in a way Intel’s handling of its intellectual property is not.

The second advantage for Google is negotiating power. In the heyday of the mainframe era, Japanese companies like Hitachi made machines that competed with IBM’s. In those days, corporate technology buyers used to refer to the “million-dollar Hitachi coffee cup.” When the IBM sales team arrived, they explained, having the Hitachi coffee cup on your desk was valuable indeed – a reminder to IBM that there was an alternative, which became a lever for negotiating lower prices.

An open Power technology, analysts say, could serve a similar role if it rises to become a genuine, price-competitive alternative to Intel-based servers.

And Google, analysts say, is potentially a big enough customer to insure that Power technology is an alternative. “Google could make this a market on its own,” said Rob Enderle, an independent analyst in San Jose.