Bang For The Buck On Entry Power10 And Power11 Machines

November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in early October, after IBM released detailed performance specifications for Power11 machines running IBM i, we put together a detailed matrix of processor configurations from Power8 through Power11 machines, marking every different processor combination for all machines. There are dozens of possible server form factor and processor configurations across those four generations of machines, and it would be very difficult to get pricing information out of Big Blue for all of them.

We poked around the IBM site for Power10 many months ago ahead of the Power11 announcements in July and then did it again after the Power11 machines were out, and showed you this very undetailed and unspecific information in last week’s issue, promising to try to get you some actual pricing information.

This week, we are making good on that promise, with current pricing on three different Power10 entry server configurations and two different Power11 entry server configurations. To be precise, we have three representative machines in the P10 IBM i software tier (two Power10 and one Power11) in the 2U server form factor and the two machines in the P20 IBM i software tier in the 4U form factor that is more expandable. We do not have a half width form factor comparison because IBM is not expected to announce the Power S1112 in the P05 IBM i tier until early in 2026.

Without further ado, here are the priced features in the Power10-based entry machines:

We include the estimated performance of these machines for the number of Power10 cores shown in the base configuration. Obviously, given the relatively high cost of the IBM i operating system on a core and the fact that a lot of IBM i customers only have two, four, or eight cores activated to run IBM i, these configurations are a little heavy. But, we expect that in P10 and P20 tier machines.

In the machines we configured, they all have 128 GB of DDR5 main memory at whatever speed is available in the systems as well as two U.2 form factor flash cards with 1.6 TB of capacity for the operating system. We are not interested in loading up the flash or disks for additional I/O, which a real machine obviously would have. We are just trying to assess the cost of a base machine and its potential peak throughput.

The first thing that you will note is that this Power10 hardware is not cheap by any standard. The base Power S1014 costs $43,216.40, which is a lot more expensive than an entry X86 that has a lot more cores these days. (And which also has very expensive systems software once you start layering on a Linux or Windows operating system, VMware or Microsoft or Red Hat virtualization, and a relational database.) The Power S1022s entry machine – a class of dual-chip Power10 machines – is a bit cheaper than the single chip module Power S1014. These machines include full 5250 enablement by default, which we have always considered a software function. The Power S1024 machine does not include full 5250 enablement by default, and it in fact costs $61,800 for this capability. But we are not including this in either the Power 1024 or Power 1124 machine, which has the same price for this 5250 feature. When we add in the software in a subsequent story, we will put this in the software stack pricing where it belongs.

Now, here is the pricing for the Power S1122, which comes in a 2U form factor with two potential Power11 sockets, and its sibling, the Power S1124, which comes in the beefier 4U form factor. (The last digit in the name tells you the form factor, and the penultimate number tells you the number of CPU sockets. The first one or two numbers tell you the processor generation.) Take a look:

The price of the Power 1122 is nearly identical to the Power S1022s, and offers a slight performance increase. The Power S1124 costs 11.4 percent less than the Power S1024 with eight processor cores fired up, which is the pricing shown and which delivers about 4 percent more performance based on IBM’s Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) database benchmark test.

And finally, just so you don’t have to do the math yourself, here is how the bang for the buck stacks up across these five machines with eight cores activated and with the performance normalized for eight cores:

Moving up to the 4U server class dramatically increases the cost of a unit of performance, but activating extra cores above and beyond the eight shown, is pretty small. It is $1,800 per core for the Power S1024 and $1,400 per core for the Power S1124. So, you have a big outlay to get the base hardware, but incremental performance latent in the machine is fairly inexpensive.

Conversely, only firing up two or four cores instead of eight does not save you all that much money, as you can see, at $1,800 or $1,400 per core. You may as well get a few cores and add Linux and see what this AI stuff is all about before someone else does it for you.

Next week, we will add the software stack to these machines and give you a sense of what complete systems cost.

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