IBM Tweaks Power8 CPU And Memory Prices Up

August 11, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It looks like IBM was not happy with some of the initial prices it set for memory and processing capacity on the new Power8 systems that were launched back in April.

In announcement letter 314-088, IBM raised the price of the core activation on the EPXH feature card. This card has a 12-core Power8 processor (really two half Power8 chips slipped into the same socket) that plugs into the Power S824, which is a two-socket machine that can run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. Its clock speed is set at 3.52 GHz. Back in April, when the machine debuted, the per-core activation fee for the processors was $1,425, but now IBM has lifted it by 18.8 percent to $1,693. The price of the underlying processor card remains the same at $7,600. If you activate all twelve cores on the base card, it now costs $27,916, which is a 13 percent price increase over the rate set back in April.

IBM has also increase the price it is charging for 64 GB main memory cards used in selected Power8 servers from $3,400 to $4,250. That is a 25 percent increase, and it applies to feature EM8D in the Power S824 system as well as to feature EL3R in the two-socket Power S822L and feature EM85 in the two-socket Power S822. The S822K machine only runs Linux from Red Hat, SUSE Linux, or Canonical, while the S822, like the S824, supports IBM i, AIX, or Linux.