IBM introduces Power10 generation of 7nm server processors
IBM has announced its IBM Power10 generation of processors. IBM makes the server chips at 7nm at Samsung. In addition to energy efficiency and performance improvements, there is the Memory Inception feature for memory clusters.
The Power10 generation is the successor to the Power9 chips that IBM has been supplying since 2017. With this, IBM is making the switch from the 14nm chip node from Power9 to 7nm at Power10. IBM claims that the performance of servers can be up to three times higher with the same consumption. For that claim, the company compares Linpack results from a dual socket server with a total of sixty cores of Power10 with a server with a total of twenty-four cores of Power9.
IBM makes dual chip modules with up to 30 Power10 cores and single chip modules with up to 15 cores. To get up to sixty cores in a system, the company therefore uses two dual chip modules. A single single chip module with fifteen cores has a size of 602mm² and is made up of eighteen billion transistors. Up to sixteen single chip modules and up to four dual chip modules can be linked together in a system.
Versions of the chips will be available with IBM’s multithreaded techniques SMT8 and SMT4. With SMT8, each core can process up to eight threads. A dual socket system with sixty SMT8 cores can handle a total of 480 threads.
In practice, a single chip module contains sixteen cores, but to increase the yield of properly working chips, a core is disabled by default to compensate for defects. The cores in such a chip can have two times 64MB L3 cache. Each module is also equipped with both an Open Memory Interface and an IBM PowerAXON interface, to communicate with 32GT / s with memory and accelerators. Finally, a pci-e 5 interface is provided.
Initially, Power10 systems with up to 4TB ddr4 can handle a maximum bandwidth of 410GB / s, but IBM states that the Open Memory Interface will eventually be able to communicate with ddr5 for higher bandwidth and capacities.
IBM focuses, among other things, on use for calculations around artificial intelligence, which is increasingly needed in enterprise applications, for example. In addition, IBM points to improvements to hardware encrypt data in memory and containers and accelerate encryption thanks to the presence of more encryption engines for aes. Also new to the Power10 generation is Memory Inception. This works through the PowerAXON interface and allows systems to enable and use the memory of another system as if it were their own memory. According to IBM, this allows users to use memory amounts of several petabytes for clusters.
The full IBM Power10 properties PDF can be found here.