IBM Power Systems Announces POWER10 Processor

The accelerating shift to hybrid cloud models worldwide requires new tools to provide greater flexibility, efficiency and security across the systems enterprises use every day. Today, IBM announced the POWER10 processor at the Hot Chips 2020 conference, bringing an innovative set of capabilities to address these needs.

The IBM POWER10 processor underscores IBM’s belief in the fourth platform of IT: hybrid cloud. With hardware co-optimized for Red Hat software, IBM POWER10-based servers will deliver the future of the hybrid cloud when they become available in the second half of 2021.

The IBM POWER10 processor is equipped with enhancements to meet enterprise demands around capacity, security, energy efficiency, elasticity and scalability. In addition, the POWER10 processor can integrate AI into enterprise business applications to drive the future of enterprise computing.

POWER10 processor innovations

Some of the new innovations of the POWER10 processor include:

◉ IBM’s first commercialized 7nm processor, expected to deliver up to a 3x improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM POWER9, allowing for greater performance.

◉ Support for multi-petabyte memory clusters with a breakthrough new technology called memory inception, designed to improve cloud capacity and economics for memory-intensive workloads from ISVs like SAP, the SAS Institute and others as well as large-model AI inference.

◉ New hardware-enabled security capabilities including transparent memory encryption designed to support end-to-end security. The IBM POWER10 processor is engineered to achieve significantly faster encryption performance with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines. In comparison to IBM POWER9, POWER10 is updated for today’s most demanding standards and anticipated future cryptographic standards like post-quantum and fully homomorphic encryption, and brings new enhancements to container security.

◉ New processor core architectures in the IBM POWER10 processor with an embedded matrix math accelerator which is extrapolated to provide 10x, 15x, and 20x faster AI inference for FP32, BFloat16, and INT8 calculations, respectively, per socket than the IBM POWER9 processor to infuse AI into business applications and drive greater insights.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM’s roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021.

Samsung will manufacture the IBM POWER10 processor, combining Samsung’s industry-leading semiconductor manufacturing with IBM’s CPU designs.