AMD + IBM Team Up To Tackle Confidential Computing

AMD and IBM are this morning announcing a multi-year, joint development agreement focused on "building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures to drive Confidential Computing in the cloud and support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing (HPC), and enterprise critical capabilities such as virtualization and encryption."

Researchers from both AMD and IBM will collaborate on hardware-based Confidential Computing to strengthen their presence in the cloud and enhancing artificial intelligence workloads. This makes more inroads for AMD EPYC in the cloud and from IBM's side strengthens their cloud offerings.

The brief press release being sent out notes that the joint development activities under the agreement are now underway. Unfortunately, however, when briefed under embargo they were not able to shed any light yet on what the initial focus is or what are the open-source projects they are looking to improve upon for this Confidential Computing initiative.

So for now any interesting technical details of this agreement are not announced but I'll be monitoring all of the usual mailing lists and Git repositories as always looking for any signs of joint AMD/IBM patches in this area over the months ahead. In any case it's good to see AMD engaging on what should be more open-source software infrastructure improvements with IBM.