Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of
August 25, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.
This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …
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The Price Tweaking Continues For Power Systems
August 18, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I have said it before and I will say it again: If you think you can keep track of IBM’s pricing for hardware, software, and services given all the ups and downs with pricing, you have a better encyclopedic mind and spreadsheet than we do.
In recent weeks, Big Blue has been at it again with the red grease pencil, making changes in the Power Systems and Storage hardware product lines. Both of the price changes we report on today actually were announced in early July and took effect immediately. They were buried in our torrent of email and I …
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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 …
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The Turning Point For Power Systems Is Here, And Now
July 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
CORRECTED Considering how everyone in the IBM midrange systems market knew that Power11 processors and the next generation of Power Systems servers using them were coming some time around the middle of this year, the dip in Power Systems servers based on Power10 technology did pretty well, we think, in the first quarter and now the second quarter.
We have to infer this, of course, because Big Blue does not provide revenue figures for sales of Power Systems iron, much less give a breakdown by sales of machines running IBM i, AIX, or Linux as their primary operating system. What …
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Power11 Entry Machines: The Power S1124 And Power L1124
July 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For several decades, a two-socket server was the workhorse machine in most datacenters, whether they were running a database machine for transaction processing or a scale-out cluster of machines for distributed Web applications and their related back-ends. And for many OS/400 and IBM i shops, the two-socket machine was the one that provided the right balance of compute and storage expansion and density.
But, over the years, as Power processor cores have gotten more powerful, customers have needed fewer and fewer cores to run their relatively modest (by comparison) and relatively static (they grow along with the business, but not …
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To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable
July 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are still assembling the information on the new Power11 processor and the Power Systems machines that use them and working on our analysis before they start shipping on July 25. We will do the most thorough job that we can under the circumstances, as always, but we concede that pricing information is very hard to come by on Power10 systems and we suspect it will be the same with Power11 systems, too.
But we will remind IBM that any new generation of machines always has improved bang for the buck, and given the modest improvements in performance moving from …
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With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”
July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Today is Power11 announcement day, and as sometimes happens during the debut of a new processor and a new platform to go along with it, we do not have all of the details necessary to tell you everything you need to know about the new Power11 processor and the four of the five Power Systems machines that will make use of it and start shipping on July 25.
Here is what we generally know. First, you will hear a lot of Spinal Tap jokes, like the one in the title above, which refers to special Marshall amplifiers which go …
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With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles
July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.
To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …
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The AS/400: A 37-Year-Old Dog That Loves To Learn New Tricks
June 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the early years of the AS/400 platform, when we were new to the IT business and there were so many different datacenter computing platforms and even more operating systems, we didn’t think about the longevity of the AS/400 and its System/38 and System/36 predecessors. It was a new platform with a heritage, a system with both a past and a future out as far as we could see with our own youth and limited experience.
But over the years, in the early 2000s in particular, we started to keep track of the years the AS/400 was around and celebrated …
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Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All
June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is pleasing, indeed, whenever you think of something that would be useful for a particular platform and then you find out that the company is working on it. This is indeed what I thought of when we reviewed the IBM i – A Strategic Preview For 2025 And Beyond session hosted by IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will at the recent POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California. I was not able to attend the event, but my co-editor, Alex Woodie, was able to, and hence we were quite pleased to see that Big Blue is apparently working on …
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