Price Cut On Power S1012 Mini Since Power S1112 Ain’t Coming Until 2026

August 11, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We told you a few weeks ago that Big Blue was not planning on putting a kicker to the Power S1012 entry server, what we call a “mini” machine due to its diminutive physical size and capacity, based on a Power11 chip into the field until sometime in early 2026. That leaves customers looking for a machine with a one or two cores and with a desire to stay in a P05 IBM i software tier a bit in a lurch.

So, on August 5, while we are away on vacation in the woods and lakes of upper Michigan, IBM chopped some prices on the Power S1012 Mini, which is code-named “Bonnell” and which is based on the Power10 processor, and did so by a pretty significant margin.

To be specific, in announcement letter AD25-1388, IBM cut the price of the base Power S1012 server by 12 percent, from $5,000 down to $4,400. (This machine is known as 9028-21B in the IBM catalog.) The system comes with two different processor options. Feature #EPG7 is a four-core Power10 processor with a base speed of 3 GHz and a maximum speed of 3.9 GHz that cost $3,799 before August 5. Now, from August 5 onwards, the charge for this processor feature is down 13 percent to $3,299. There is also an eight-core Power10 processor feature for the Power S1012 Mini that has the same clock speed ranges but that is a lot more expensive to buy at $11,999 after the price cut. That price is now down by 8 percent from $12,999 before the August 5 price change, which is not as deep of a cut obviously.

The yields on the Power10 processor must not have been all that great because the cost per core after the price changes were $412 for the four-core processor card, but are $1,500 a pop for the eight-core variant. (The Power10 and Power11 chips both have sixteen physical cores on their monolithic dies.) Twice the yield in cores costs 3.64X as much money per core.

There is also a single-core Power S012 processor feature aimed specifically at IBM i shops, but it did not get a price cut. The one-core and four-core Power10 cards are in the P05 software tier, and the eight-core Power10 card is in the P10 software tier.

In addition to the base system and the two processor cards getting price cuts, the main memory features of the Bonnell Power10-based Mini system also had their prices chopped. This machine used 3.2 GHz industry-standard DDR4 memory, not the buffered “Centaur” differential memory used in other Power10 and Power11 machines. The price of a 32 GB DDR4 memory stick for the Bonnell machine is now 25 percent lower, to $1,199, which works out to $37.47 per GB. The fatter 64 GB sticks now cost 19 percent less at $2,599, which is $40.61 per GB, and the even fatter 128 GB sticks are now down 19 percent as well to $4,999, which works out to $39.05 per GB.

It is not clear if prices for processor activations are lower for the Power S1012, nor has Big Blue cut prices for IBM i subscriptions for this Bonnell machine.

These price cuts come in the wake of many price hikes in late 2024 and in early 2025 for the Power Systems and IBM i platform, and it is not clear how the original Bonnell system price from May 2024 matches up to the discounted price of August 2025. But clearly any price cut in the face of global inflation is a good thing.

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