It Would be Uncommon For IBM Announcements To Not Be In May

March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For as long as we can remember, there is a general trend of spring and fall announcements for the IBM midrange. It is not a perfect correlation, of course. The original AS/400 announcement was done on the summer solstice on June 21, 1988, which does not fit the pattern we are talking about. But in general, the spring-fall pattern is something that goes back long before enterprise Linux releases and OpenStack releases all shifted to an April-October cadence.

This being a new year and the POWERUp2024 conference being held May 20 through 23 in Fort Worth, Texas, we are expecting that Big Blue will be doing something in terms of announcements for the Power Systems line of machines and for its IBM i and AIX operating systems as well sometime either before what used to be called COMMON or during it. We are hoping before so the cat is out of the bag ahead of the conference and therefore the talk will be about what it means rather than what it is.

The word on the street, and it is not precise in any way, is that we should expect some sort of announcement at the entry part of the Power Systems product line, which is where the IBM i platform drives the business. We are not sure what it will be, but there are a lot of things one might consider.

Back in October, when the Power10 platform was already more than a year in the field, we argued that if the Power11 chip and its hardware platforms were not going to be available until sometime in 2025 – maybe in the summer at the unconventional time as the AS/400 and the Power10 launch were both, but that is just a guess – that IBM should do a Power10+ update on the processor and something interesting with the platforms that use it to give IBM i shops a reason to buy hardware in 2024 and not wait until 2025 or 2026 to do so. We think this Power10+ should have a fast pipe to link to GPU accelerators so it can be used for AI training and inference. (The details about how to do this and why are in that October story. We are not going to repeat it here.)

Or, now that we have our thinking cap on, we would love for there to be a new kind of entry Power Systems machine that only runs IBM i and that does not have its memory system intentionally crimped in terms of capacity or bandwidth. Something that has perhaps a single Power10 chip with all 15 cores fired up, but only one core dedicated for IBM i and that can have lots of main memory allocated to it to create what is in essence an in-memory implementation of IBM i. And then the other 14 cores would support multiple partitions for running Linux and modern AI and data analytics workloads on the same machine. Or maybe even a second Power10 processor with 15 cores for a total of 29 cores for AI and data analytics workloads. Why not?

And while we are at it, why not create an IBM i P02 software tier that is super cheap so customers will be encouraged to run IBM’s watsonx software stack on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on those 14 cores or 29 cores.

Even if there is not a Power10+ machine, there can be a rejiggered Power10 machine that provides this capability and that maybe showcases a very aggressive subscription price for both hardware and software.

We will be keeping an ear out for what IBM might be up to, but for now, all we are hearing is murmurings and we don’t really know what might be in the works. And of course, plans change until they are locked into an announcement letter.

We will keep an ear to the ground, and if you hear anything, let us know.

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