&gt; I assume you&#x27;re referring that your addon (card?) can introspect into the CPU cache? That&#x27;s pretty awesome if that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening.<p>Y - see page 5, section 3.1.1 of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-304.ibm.com&#x2F;webapp&#x2F;set2&#x2F;sas&#x2F;f&#x2F;capi&#x2F;CAPI_POWER8.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-304.ibm.com&#x2F;webapp&#x2F;set2&#x2F;sas&#x2F;f&#x2F;capi&#x2F;CAPI_POWER8.pd...</a> for some info. Also - it doesn&#x27;t have to be a card. ;-) It just is that today...<p>&gt; RAM Emulation<p>This is hard. Telling a program (and the OS) that different pages are fundamentally different will require some pretty drastic changes. For example-  how does one malloc memory from an NVDIMM vs a regular DIMM, and differentiate between the two?<p>&gt; Performance<p>Yes - as an example we can show that it takes ~26 threads on the CPU to drive ~450k IOPs to some external storage. Doing the same thing with the accelerated IO path requires about 4 HW threads on the main CPU. This kind of lines up with the point of the article.<p>&gt; Are you aware of any alternative offerings for x86 that offer similar performance?<p>To my knowledge no one else has a similar architecture that&#x27;s shipping today.<p>&gt;- What does this thing (I have no idea if it&#x27;s a card, a module...) look like? Being able to see &quot;the thing&quot; is generally really cool :)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nallatech.com&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;openpower-capi-developer-kit-for-power-8&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nallatech.com&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;openpower-capi-developer-...</a> or <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alpha-data.com&#x2F;dcp&#x2F;capi.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alpha-data.com&#x2F;dcp&#x2F;capi.php</a> are your choices for Altera or Xilinx FPGA support (as of today).<p>&gt; a) re: ATX<p>see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enterprisetech.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;tyan-ships-first-non-ibm-power8-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enterprisetech.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;tyan-ships-first-no...</a> from last year. Go talk to Tyan if you want to buy one.<p>&gt; b) if&#x2F;when full-scale POWER8 systems will be available in the style of Heroku&#x2F;OpenShift.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ptopenlab.com&#x2F;cloudlabconsole&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ptopenlab.com&#x2F;cloudlabconsole&#x2F;index.html</a> has some boxes with CAPI cards...