Stacking Up Power10 And Power11 Systems Price/Performance

November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been on the hunt to get you pricing on entry Power11 machines in the P10 and P20 IBM i software tiers to give you a sense of the relative price/performance of the Power11 machines compared to their Power10 predecessors. There are dozens of possible configurations of entry, midrange, and enterprise machines in these two families, and without an official and public price list, as Big Blue provided for many years, it is very difficult for even business partners to get pricing.

In fact, they need to use IBM’s official configurator, and they need to have a Power System serial number from a real customer to get that configurator to figure out a price of a given configuration. In this way, IBM can see what deals are going down in its channel and have a sense of what customers were looking at and what they ultimately chose to acquire. This is smart, but it is annoying and it also limits the kind of multidimensional analysis that we are fond of doing, where we compare the cost of adding compute, memory, and I/O to figure out the best way to get a certain amount of performance for a specific amount of money.

Ah, the good old days, when IBM sold 50,000 or 60,000 machines a year running OS/400 or IBM i and its price list was available as a giant, single list and an intrepid armchair system architect could build a spreadsheet encapsulating a huge number of price/performance options with IBM’s Performance Tools. . . . Getting five configurations to do comparisons seems insufficient given the hundreds of different configurations I used to look at to give advice to customers about how to spend the least amount of money to get the most amount of work done.

Last week, we did the pricing on three Power10 machines and two Power11 machines, which we think are representative of entry and midrange hardware configurations. We priced up the machines and then normalized the cost of the hardware for eight-core configurations. This week, we add in the cost of the IBM i operating system, PowerVM server virtualization, PowerVC OpenStack private cloud, and Rational Developer for i compilers to get a sense of the relative bang for the buck for a more complete system.

Note: The Power S1024 machine that came out of the IBM eConfig system had twelve cores, so we had to deactivate some of them and also take the IBM i stack off of them to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, which you fill see in the final table. We also adjusted the performance rating of the Power S1024 to reflect the number of cores active on this machine. Performance is show for IBM’s Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) database benchmark test, which is a variant of the TPC-E transaction processing test.

Also note: We cannot do P05 system configuration comparisons with Power11 yet because we do not expect for there to be a P05 machine using the Power11 chip launched until early 2026. When that happens, we will try to get pricing information on one-core and four-core P05 machines and gin up some four-core P10 machines to compare even smaller boxes than the ones shown in our tables in this article series.

Let’s start with basic IBM i software stack pricing for the three Power10 entry machines:

Remember: This is just for the priced features of the basic IBM i stack. Big Blue has added a whole slew of things as freebies to sweeten the subscription deal – things that used to be licensed and priced, such as the PowerVM hypervisor and performance, management, printer drivers, fonts, media extensions, job scheduling, SQL query, PC access and emulation, system clustering and SMP database performance boost tools.

Just for easy reference, 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 as we said last week, we expect that in P10 tier and P20 tier machines.

The details of the hardware configurations are in last week’s story, which you can see here, but generally, the machines have 128 GB of DDR5 main memory and two U.2 form factor flash cards with 1.6 TB of capacity for the operating system. We did not load up the flash or disks for additional I/O and storage capacity, which a real machine obviously would have, because we were assessing the cost of a base machine and its potential peak throughput for eight cores.

The eConfig system kicks out IBM i subscription pricing at this point, since IBM has withdrawn perpetual IBM i licenses for new orders excepting for special cases on enterprise-class machines. There is no difference in software stack pricing on the Power S1014 (one-socket, 4U chassis) compared to the Power S1022s (two-socket, 2U chassis) since both are on the P10 software tier and both are configured with ten users. And when you do the math on an eight-core setup, it works out to $1,791 per core per year for a three-year subscription term.

On a 12-core Power S1024, which is in the P20 tier, those 12 cores cost 3.5X as much to equip with the base IBM i stack, but when you adjust it down to eight cores, it works out to 2.9X, which is $5,231 per core per year. We have moved the full 5250 green screen software enablement to the software side of the system price – where it rightfully belongs – since this is really still a perpetual license to let the 5250 protocol run at an uncrippled speed. This is not, nor was it ever in the two decades that IBM has been playing this game, a hardware feature. This represents 41.2 percent of the software price for a three-year subscription and it is not sold as a subscription, and that means as customers add users or stretch out the term of the IBM i stack license to four or five years, its share of the IBM i stack cost goes down.

Here is how the two Power11 machines stack up in terms of priced software features:

The subscription price on the Power 1122, which is in the P10 tier, with eight cores is a little bit more expensive, at $46,027 for three years. That works out to $1,918 per core per year, a 7.1 percent increase over what it costs to run IBM i on the Power S1014 or Power S1022s machines in our comparison – offsetting some of the price/performance benefits of the underlying Power11 hardware.

On the Power S1124, the eConfig kicked out a price that was a little bit cheaper, and we have no idea why. The full 5250 enablement pricing was the same at $61,800. But across eight cores, it cost $125,546.33 for the base IBM i stack – IBM i and the freebies, PowerVC, and RDi – cost $122,503, which works out to $5,104 per core per year, a 2.5 percent lower price than what eConfig said for the Power S1024 with eight cores.

Now, let’s bring it all back together, adding up the hardware and base software costs to get a system price on machines with eight cores running IBM i:

On a cost per CPW basis for a three year subscription term, the Power S1122 is 10.5 percent cheaper than the Power 1022s machine, which is the closest comparison we can make for this machine class. And the Power S1124 is 5.9 percent cheaper on a cost per CPW basis compared to the Power S1024. This is not a huge improvement for price/performance considering it has been four years since the Power10 was launched.

We remember a world where bang for the buck always went up a lot more with each passing generation. Which is another way of saying that you have to negotiate harder to get the kind of improvement in value you expect in a world where Moore’s Law advancements and Denard scaling have stopped, or justify the lack of improvement by making use of other features in the Power11 chip, like native AI processing, to justify the expense. This latter bit should be relatively easy, and actually provides significant value that we will try to quantify in a future story.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search