With the open-source machine barreling forward and faster each day, you have to wonder when it will meet a roadblock. For all the barriers to open computing coming down all the time, there remains one barrier that could pose big challenges. According to Aaron Sullivan, distinguished engineer at Rackspace US, Inc., the tasks that future IT will demand of computing systems pose daunting challenges to engineers and developers.

“They’re really huge challenges,” he told David Floyer (@dfloyer), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. “They go from the chips all the way to the top of the stack. And if you don’t have the chip part open, and you don’t have the firmware part open, it becomes really difficult to collaborate,” he said.

Sullivan, whose company is collaborating with Google on OpenPOWER projects, said that the talent and vision of the best developers will be limited without the opening up of hardware. “You can’t bring to bear the sort of force of the world’s software developers on to it [old hardware],” he said. “You wind up in these little silos and niches.”

Software and silicon together at last

Sullivan said that the benefits of bringing the software closer to the silicon are dramatic and already obvious to IT professionals.

“There are certain workloads that are very common today that you can boost tenfold or more simply by reintegrating the software tighter to the hardware,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenPOWER Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE