With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”

July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Today is Power11 announcement day, and as sometimes happens during the debut of a new processor and a new platform to go along with it, we do not have all of the details necessary to tell you everything you need to know about the new Power11 processor and the four of the five Power Systems machines that will make use of it and start shipping on July 25.

Here is what we generally know. First, you will hear a lot of Spinal Tap jokes, like the one in the title above, which refers to special Marshall amplifiers which go to 11 instead of the normal 10 on their knobs. Second, you will be able to get more performance and better power efficiency with Power11 systems compared to Power10 iron.

The Power11 chips have 16 cores on their dies just like the Power10 chips did, and like the Power10, a maximum of 15 of those 16 cores can be activated to be used by IBM i, AIX, or Linux operating systems. Unlike the Power10, that 16^th core is now a spare tire, and in an emergency when and if a Power11 core has an error or somehow isn’t working right (which we presume is a fairly rare event, mind you), that spare core can be activated to run production workloads.

But don’t get the wrong idea. You are not going to be able to call up IBM and ask for a special PRPQ to activate all 16 cores on a Power11 chip, according to Daniel Goldener, who is worldwide product manager for IBM Power and who spoke to IT Jungle ahead of the Power11 chip and system launch.

“There is no way to do that,” explains Goldener. “That is a hard stop ‘No.’ If you want to use the analogy to the spare tires, that’s helping a lot. So this spare tire is there in your car, but you can’t use it until one of the real tires goes flat. We are using the same analogy, with the difference being that with the car, if you have flat tire you have a downtime. In this case with the spare core, you don’t.”

So, that is that. The spare 16^th core will activate automagically if a core fails. Which is neat, and we don’t know of another server platform that has latent cores and hot sparing of cores. (We have suggested that IBM do this for many years.)

That extra core in the Power10 was there to help increase the yields on Samsung’s 7 nanometer chip manufacturing processes. If you knew you didn’t need one of the sixteen cores to make your systems, you can use 100 percent of any chips that have at least fifteen cores activated and working. This is like getting 6.25 percent yield for free. With the refined 7 nanometer process from Samsung being used by IBM for Power11, the yield is already better and that spare core is going to work, too. And hence the hot sparing.

With that refined 7 nanometer process, IBM is also able to get faster clock speeds out of Samsung on the Power11 than it could get from the Power10. Had IBM used a strategy from a different time, this so-called Power11 chip would have been etched using Samsung’s 5 nanometer process and boosted its performance while shrinking the power and it would have been called the Power10+ chip. But the improvement with a Power11 shrink from 7 nanometers to 5 nanometers was not enough to justify the cost. And to be fair, as we said before, what became Power10 was more like a Power11 design cycle and the Power10 as originally conceived was scrapped thanks to GlobalFoundries and its fab issues. So in another sense, this is really the Power11+ chip.

Anyway, here are two examples of the clock speed deltas. The Power10 chip used in the two-socket Power S1022 server ran at 4 GHz flat, but the Power11 chip in the two-socket Power S1122 will cycle up to 4.15 GHz. That is a nominal increase, but IBM is also boosting the number of cores in the Power11 machine because the yields have gone way up on the refined 7 nanometer process. We do not have precise numbers across the whole Power11 product line, but Goldener tells The Four Hundred that the Power S1120 will have 50 percent more cores than the Power S1020, and they will run a bit faster, too, so that should be 56 percent more performance on just the hardware alone. With tweaks to software and various tunings, the performance boost will be even higher for many different types of applications.

On the Power E1180, the cores run at 4.4 GHz, and on the Power E1080, by contrast, the cores had a maximum clock speed of 4.15 GHz. That is a tiny but more than 6 percent more oomph from clock speeds alone, and we strongly suspect that IBM will be doubling up the cores with a dual-chip module. (We don’t know the exact number.)

We do not know anything about pricing yet, but each new generation of hardware implies higher performance and better price/performance, so that is our expectation and we will be working to figure out what the deal is with the Power11 machines.

Five machines are being revealed today for shipments starting on July 25 – that would be the Power S1122 and Power L1122 (different from each other in configuration and pricing, with the L models being lower cost and running only Linux), the Power S1124 and Power L1124 (ditto here), the Power E1150 midrange box, and the Power E1180 high-end machine. Next year, IBM will roll out the kicker to the “Bonnell” Power S1012, which will also be a half-width single-socket machine with relatively low core count aimed at entry customers and which will be called the Power S1112. The Power11 chips will also be available in systems on the PowerVS cloud starting on July 15, and in a way, PowerVS is a sixth kind of system from the point of view of customers. (We do not know what machines IBM itself is deploying in the PowerVS cloud, but we strongly suspect it will be a mix of Power S1112 entry machines and Power E1180 high-end machines.)

With the Power11, IBM is focusing a lot on energy efficiency, which is something that Goldener says is based on input from customers who want to spend less on operational expenses. There is a 2.5D integrated stacked capacitor and other thermal technologies that help optimize power consumption with the Power11 chip (we will be looking into this more deeply once we find out more), and IBM has also added a third operating mode with the Power11 processor that allows customers to find a middle path between the maximum performance mode and maximum energy savings modes of the Power10 processor. With the Power11, there is an energy efficient mode that lets you sacrifice somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of core performance to save up to 28 percent in energy consumption as the core runs. (Goldener called this a “smart thermometer” approach.)

The Power11 machine use high-speed DDR5 memory, as we have previously reported, but as we found out two months ago, at least some of the Power11 machines will also support DDR4 memory cards if customers don’t want to reinvest in memory and are willing to sacrifice some memory bandwidth to preserve their investments.

We will be digging around for the announcement letters and the Redbooks to get you more specific information about the Power11 machines and your upgrade options. Stay tuned.

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