What Price Power?

November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the things that is great about the cloud is that the cost of a configured server instance with a given compute, memory, storage, and network capacity has a published list price, including volume discounts for reserving instances over relatively long periods of time. Similarly, sellers of X86 servers – mainly Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and mainly for entry and midrange X86 machines – still have online configurators that allow customers to see all of the pricing on components and to actually configure the machines they want to order, making tradeoffs for overall price and feature function and capacity.

The Power Systems market has never offered entry and midrange customers an online configurator over the Web so customers could do what-if configuration analysis, which is a shame. Pricing information is promised mostly for sales prospects: Give us your details and why you are interested in an IBM i, or AIX, or Linux machine based on Power, and we will help you get a price. Published list prices given as part of Power Systems announcements have been generally pretty useless, too. “Starting at $29,000. . .” or some such nonsense, with no configuration given most of the time and not including the cost of the systems software stack most of the time.

For many decades, we got around these limitations on pricing given to the public because we had access to online price lists and we read the IBM Sales Manual to learn about how to configure machines from it and then ginned up our own configurations by hand to allow us to do price/performance analysis over the many AS/400, System i, and IBM i system generations. Sometimes, people within IBM actually gave us data to help us understand relative price/performance across the generations. (And, we thank you once again for understanding that we are trying to help IBM i customers do a better job promoting the platform at their companies.)

We are still committed to this goal of doing price/performance analysis, but it has gotten increasingly harder to get our hands on pricing information. This week, we thought we would just compile and share the pricing information we could find online from Big Blue for its Power10 and Power11 machines, and the only ones that it is giving pricing information on are entry machines.

Just ahead of the Power11 announcements back in July, we poked around IBM’s Web site to see what data was out there about Power10 system pricing so we would not lose this data once the Power11 machines were launched. Let’s go through it so you have it, too. Here is the pricing and configuration of a Power S1012 machine with four Power10 cores running at 3 GHz and 20 IBM i users:

This price seems to imply the IBM i operating system is included, and using subscription pricing, as well as the PowerVM Enterprise Edition server virtualization hypervisor is.

Here is an eight-core Power10 machine, the Power S1014, with 100 IBM i users:

Now, we shift to Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be specific, running on Power machines. Here is a Power S1012 with eight Power10 cores running at 3 GHz configured with RHEL:

IBM says that this machine is configured for Generative AI, and we wonder in what sense this is not true of every Power10 machine, which includes vector and matrix math units for doing GenAI processing locally on the host CPU rather than offloading it to GPUs made by Nvidia or AMD.

Here is a Power L1024 set up to run the SAP HANA in-memory database and its applications:

This one is also running RHEL, and has 12 Power10 cores running at 3.4 GHz and 2 TB of memory. Look at how cheap that is for the amount of compute in the box.

Here is a Power Systems setup using Power10 processors aimed at being a container platform using IBM’s OpenShift Kubernetes container management platform atop a Power L1022 with a dozen Power10 cores running at 2.9 GHz with a half terabyte of main memory:

This, again, seems pretty aggressively priced compared to the IBM i machines, and that is because IBM i has a relational database embedded within it that is part of its price, and RHEL and AIX do not have an embedded Db2 database. You can, of course, get Db2 for Linux and put it on the box, or Oracle’s eponymous database as well.

For those of you who like AIX, here is an entry Power S1012 machine with eight 3 GHz Power10 cores running AIX 7.3 Standard Edition:

And finally, here is the pricing on a Power S1022 machine set up with AIX 7.3 Standard Edition:

This system as two Power10 processors with sixteen cores each, running at 2.75 GHz, with 1 TB of main memory running AIX 7.3 Standard Edition and the PowerVM Enterprise hypervisor.

After the Power11 processors were launched in July, we found these three configurations, showing a Power S1012 with four Power10 cores running at 3 GHz against two different Power S1122 machines with a pair of four-core Power11 processors running at 3.6 GHz:

And here is the pricing for these three configurations:

The Power S1012 machine price and configuration has not changed, as you can see. The two Power S1122 configurations are set up with 30 or 100 IBM i users, respectively, and have minor differences in the hardware but big differences in their IBM i subscription prices given the number of users.

We are poking around to get more detailed system, systems software, and support pricing for entry and midrange Power10 and Power11 systems – ones that we can use to do better price/performance analysis. Stay tuned.

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