IBM Announces Hybrid Power Servers With Power10 Processors

IBM has announced a new generation of Power servers specifically designed for hybrid cloud environments. The Power E1080 is equipped with a Power10 processor, built on a 7nm process.

Among other things, the Power E1080 server promises 2.5 times more compute per core than x86-based servers, and four times the OpenShift containerized throughput per core than x86 servers. That means more workloads can be deployed simultaneously on a single system. The servers offer better performance when running SAP applications, among other things, IBM claims based on SAP standard benchmarks that it has run itself.

With the new system, IBM is specifically focusing on hybrid cloud environments, where the server on premise will support the hardware in data centers with heavy computational tasks. The company would prefer to see the server combined with its Power Virtual Server, IBM’s cloud server.

For that hybrid model, IBM has a close collaboration with Red Hat, which is part of IBM. The Power E1080 is the first on-premise system to support ‘metering by the minute’, IBM states, or measuring the use of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift to the minute. IBM also designed the server to have the ability to scale effortlessly through a cloud environment using what IBM calls Power Private Cloud for Dynamic Capacity. This allows unused CPU capacity to be scaled up and down, whereby customers only pay for the resources actually used.

With the Power10 CPU at the core of the server, IBM promises up to 30 percent more performance per core and 50 percent more capacity at the socket and system level, compared to the Power E980. That translates to 33 percent less energy consumption for the same tasks. IBM announced the Power10 server processor in August 2020. The processor is built on Samsung’s 7nm process, which is a significant improvement over the previous generation’s 14nm chip node, the Power9.

In addition to hybrid cloud solutions, IBM is also launching the Power E1080 for AI tasks. The E1080 features four matrix math accelerators per core, making AI inferences five times faster than its predecessor, the E980. IBM expects to ship the Power E1080 to customers from the end of September.