Curiosity questions and comments about POWER8

[Joe Nosay]

Has anyone else checked into trying to obtain a board? Tyan technologies
had/ has?? an atx type board that was used- possibly- by Google. IBM et al
have the Open Power Foundation available with the student option available
for no cost.
POWER8 is open.
There has been no response from any of the companies developing boards and
servers with POWER8 chips/cores. I'm tempted to see if Google would be
willing to make some available to the general public- here being BSD and
Linux developers/porters. No information has been released as to whether
the boot process is direct like a few of the Genesi or if a bootloader is
used.