IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the Power S812 Mini, which was a version of the Linux-only Power S812L single-socket Power8 machine that had been allowed to run IBM i and that has a single 3.03 GHz core activated and 64 GB of main memory; it would be rated at somewhere just under 10,000 CPWs. IBM never did announce a Power S912 super-entry machine based on the Power9, but it did extend the life of the Power S812 until June 2020. The Power S914 was the smallest machine an IBM i shops could buy, unless they wanted a secondhand Power S812 Mini.

When the entry and midrange Power10 machines were launched in July 2022, there was no Power S1012 Mini and once again the Power S1014 machine, which we detailed here, was the smallest – meaning least capacious in terms of computing and storage – system that customers could buy to run IBM i workloads.

But today, the Power S1012 Mini, which goes by the codename “Bonnell,” system is being launched by Big Blue and will be particularly useful for a lot of IBM i shops in a number of ways. We are still digging for all of the details on this new Bonnell machine so we can do full comparisons with prior entry Power8, Power9, and Power10 machines.

Here is how the Power S1012 lines up against the other Power10 entry machines:

The Power S1012 is a single socket server, and interestingly, it is a half width machine that fits in a 2U rack enclosure and that is also available in a small tower form factor. The Power S1012 node is only 26 inches deep instead of the 39 inches of a standard rack machine, which is why you can make a pretty small tower machine – what IBM is calling a “near edge” machine – out of it.

Each S1012 node has a single Power10 processor, which can have 1, 4, or 8 cores activated, which suggests that it is the same single chip module (SCM) implementation of the Power10 processor that was used in the Power S1022s entry machine. The Power S1012 node has four ISDIMM memory slots (using the differential signaling created by Big Blue for its Power10 memory) with a maximum capacity of 256 GB. The node has four half-height, half-length PCI-Express 5.0 slots and room for four NVM-Express U.2 drive bays that come in a maximum 1.6 TB capacity each for a total of 6.4 TB of storage.

Here is a zoom in on two Power S1012 nodes sharing a rack enclosure:

Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it?

And here is what the tower configuration looks like:

Here is the one-pager spec sheet that confirms that the Power S1012 is indeed based on the Power10 SCM with eight cores:

The eight-core version of the Power10 SCM is only available in the rack configuration, while the one-core and four-core versions are available in rack or tower configurations. The four-core and eight-core versions can run IBM i, AIX, or Linux, but the one-core version can only run IBM i and it has its main memory capped at the same 64 GB that other single-core Power Systems machines have been subjected to. We have suggested that 128 GB or even 256 GB is more appropriate given modern workloads, but Big Blue is standing its ground here. If you need more memory than 64 GB, then this machine is not for you.

The one-core and four-core machines are in the IBM i P05 software tier and the eight core machine is in the P10 software tier, by the way.

The Power S1012 will be available on June 14. And we will be doing our thorough comparisons with prior Power Systems entry machines and pricing analysis in future stories, as well as talking to IBM’s top brass about their aspirations for the Bonnell system, which is humorously named after the highest “mountain” in Austin, Texas where Power Systems processors are designed. It is 775 feet above sea level. It is hard to say how high it is above the local ground, but perhaps half that height above the Colorado River, which runs through the city. Anyway, stay tuned for a lot more details and insight.

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