IBM has announced Power System S824L – the first server designed in partnership with the OpenPower Foundation, a collaboration between technology vendors that’s meant to make its Power Architecture more attractive to customers.

The server features IBM’s latest Power8 processors, along with GPUs from OpenPower member Nvidia. It is aimed at webscale applications – to put it simply, IBM wants to get inside the data centers run by the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

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IBM launched the updated lineup of Power Systems in April, while promising that third-party variations on its implementation of the RISC design strategy wouldn’t be far behind.

The OpenPower Foundation was announced last year as a network of select partners, with whom IBM would share processor specifications, hoping this would advance the Power ecosystem.

Today, it counts 59 organisations amomng its members including Google, Samsung, Micron and Nvidia.

The first hardware to emerge from this approach is the Power Systems S824L, a 2-socket, 2U server based on Power8 processors – tiny pieces of silicon placed on ‘processor cards’ that IBM says perform 20 percent better than an equally priced number of Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPUs.

Each S824L server can feature up to 24 Power8 cores, up to 1TB of RAM, 12 hard drive bays and a yet unnamed Nvidia GPU. At the moment, the hardware can only speak Linux.

Power8 is IBM’s last remaining weapon against Intel and its x86 instruction set architecture, after the company completed the sale of its x86 business to Lenovo earlier this week.

Power Systems S824L will start shipping at the end of October