The Power11 IBM i P05 Entry Machine Finally Arrives

July 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The new entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server, based on the Power11 processor that IBM introduced a year ago in all of the other Power Systems machines, was revealed last week and will be shipping almost everywhere in the world starting on July 24. The exceptions are that the Power S1112 will ship in Taiwan on September 14 and will ship in China and India starting December 11.

The other members of the Power11 server family were announced on July 8 last year, and the Power11 lineup has been without a machine that is in the lowest P05 software tier for the IBM i operating system. It is debatable whether this has actually been a problem or not, given how much performance is already within a Power10 core. In any event, we expected the full product line to come out last July and it did not, with IBM saying the update to the half-width Bonnell server, which we are calling the Bonnell+ machine, would not come until 2026. Most people we talked to in the business partner community expected the Bonnell+ machine to come out in Q1 2026, with March the timeframe mentioned most often. Then we expected it around the POWERUp 2026 IBM midrange systems conference in late April. And that didn’t happen. Then we expected it at the THINK 2026 IBM partner conference in early May. And that didn’t happen, and at the same time, the expected Technology Refreshes for IBM i also did not happen. Why both were announced on July 15 is a bit of a mystery.

For the Power S1112 hardware, I think IBM had some Power10-based “Bonnell” machines in the barn as the summer of 2025 rolled around and it wanted to sell them before launching the Power11 “Bonnell+” machine. Hence the delay, and that is just a guess not an inside dope. The Bonnell+ system was expected originally in the March quarter of 2026 and then the word on the street was that it was pushed out to July, which turned out to be true. With memory and flash prices going through the roof starting last fall, there is no question that IBM would want to sell what is on the truck, even if it has switched to a build to order model.

The enclosure for the Power S1112 is the same half-width, 2U high server sled that was used by the original Power10-based Bonnell Power S1012 launched back in May 2024, nearly two years after the first Power10 machines came out. So, in a sense, this Power S1112 rollout is a faster than for its Power S1012 predecessor. With the Power11 Mini Machine, IBM is upgrading its OMI memory cards to DDR5 memory, and there are processor performance and performance per watt improvements that come with the move to the Power11 chip, as was the case with the rest of the Power11 system lineup.

The Power S1112 has two different processor card options, as you can see in announcement letter AD26-0122. For a lot of entry IBM i shops, the feature #EJMT processor card will be the one, which can have from one to four Power11 cores running at a base 3.6 GHz with a 4 GHz top speed. This machine, which is the one that is in the P05 software tier for IBM i, comes in both rack and tower configurations, and there is a feature #2319 that allows this processor card to be permanently downgraded to a single active core to create that P05-class machine. Feature #EJSV has 10 of the 16 cores on the Power11 chip activated, and they run at a base speed of 3.05 GHz and also top out at a 4 GHz clock speed. This card is in the P10 IBM i software tier.

Here is what the Bonnell+ sled looks like with the top off:

The spec sheet for the Power S1112 says that the four-core Power11 chip used in the machine us rated at 117,300 on IBM’s Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) benchmark test, and that the ten-core variant is rated at 116,500 for a four-core IBM i partition. The spec sheet from IBM adds that the Power S1112 offers 2X better performance per core than the Power9-based Power S914 Mini and delivers 3X the performance per core of the Power S814 Mini. We will be digging around for more specific CPW ratings for all of the Power S1112 processor cores as well as pricing information.

I could not find the Power S1112 listed for IBM i configurations yet on Big Blue’s IBM i system pricing page, which may be because it is not yet shipping. But no matter what, it seems the day of the base IBM i machine with a couple of cores active and 64 GB of memory and some flash for $25,000 or $30,000 is probably long gone, given the increases in system, CPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage costs that have whacked all system manufacturers since the GenAI boom created more demand for these components than can be supplied.

The Power S1112 has four DDR5-based OpenCAPI Memory Interface (OMI) memory slots, and these can be configured with as little as one 64 GB card (which has a pair of 32 GB DIMMs) to as many as four 128 GB DIMMs in a pair of 256 GB memory. No matter what, always fill all four memory slots in the system to maximize memory bandwidth as well as capacity. By the way, these DDR5 OMI memory cards run at 4 GHz or 4.8 GHz, and it is not clear what card run at which speed. (We will see it when the Redbook for the Power S1112 comes out.) This is not particularly fast, with Arm and X86 CPUs using 8.8 GHz DDR% memory these days to crank up the bandwidth.

The Power S1112 has four PCI-Express slots: a pair of PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots (half height and half length) and a pair of PCI-Express 4.0 x8 slots (also half height and half length). If IBM had really redesigned the Bonnell+ system board, these would be PCI-Express 5.0 slots with twice the bandwidth of the PCI-Express 4.0 slots that date to the Power10-based Bonnell machine from more than two years ago.

As for storage, the Bonnell+ system has four NVM-Express slots that can house up to 12.8 TB of aggregate capacity. The rack version of the Bonnell+ machine can have one feature #ENZO PCI-Express expansion drawer, which can hold six PCI-Express 4.0 devices. The machine comes with either one four port 1 Gb/sec Ethernet adapter or an Ethernet adapter that supports a single 1 Gb/sec, 10 Gb/sec, or 25 Gb/sec port. This is not a lot of bandwidth in the modern era.

The Power S1112 can run AIX and Linux as well, of course. We wonder how many Bonnell machines that IBM sold running AIX or Linux. The system supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6 and 10.2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7 or later or 16 as well as AIX 7.2 and 7.3 and IBM i 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6.

I will be scrounging for more details on how the Power S1112 compares to the previous entry Power machines as well as to current X86 and Arm systems on premises and in the cloud. If you ask for IBM to big on a Power S1112, share what it tells you so we can learn.

One thought on “The Power11 IBM i P05 Entry Machine Finally Arrives”

Robert Berendt says:

July 20, 2026 at 8:34 am

Yes, software houses have been looking for a Power 11 version. Not that they need the horsepower but they had to upgrade their Power 9’s to support 7.6. Power 10 was a much less desirable option because they will likely not support rNext of IBM i if IBM keeps up the pattern of
7.6 not supported on Power 9
7.5 not supported on Power 8
7.4 not supported on power 7
…
Software vendors do not want to have to replace their Power 10’s in two years.

It does little good to come out with a behemoth version of the latest hardware if the company that desperately needs it cannot get their vendor software approved on the OS required for that machine.
See these “Ideas”
https://ibm-power-systems.ideas.ibm.com/ideas/PSD-I-61
https://ibm-power-systems.ideas.ibm.com/ideas/IBMI-I-4596

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search