Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM’s CEO Says GenAI Is Great For Enterprise, But It Will Not Be AGI
December 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You might think that Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer of IBM, just has a bad case of sour grapes because Nvidia, not Big Blue, is the dominant supplier of AI hardware and the main driver of the GenAI boom. But maybe Krishna is just the adult in the room with deep experience with enterprise customers, and that is why he poured some cold water on the exuberant spending forecasts for AI systems spending.
Krisha sat down with Nillay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge on his Decoder podcast last week, and as part of an hour-long conversation, they …
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Happy Holidays To All Of You From All Of Us
December 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, 2025 is almost in the rear view mirror, as hard as that may be to believe. And thank heavens for the holidays – they are literally holy days – that give us a chance to reflect on the year and to spend precious time with family and friends.
As the years go by, time seems to run faster and faster, but that is, in part, an illusion that is caused by the cycle time of the real neural network in your head and decreasing differentiation among functional areas in our brains. Neurons fire less often as we age, and …
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Stacking Up Entry IBM i-Power11 Systems Against Windows X86 Platforms
December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Having spent the past several weeks going over the hardware and software costs and performance of systems in the IBM i P10 and P20 software tiers. We had an admittedly small sample, but one that we could get Big Blue’s pricing information for, which is hard to come by. This week we wanted to see how those entry P10-class and P20-class machines stack up against modern X86 servers based on Intel’s latest Xeon 6 systems running a Windows Server stack that was functionally equivalent to the IBM i stack.
So we did a little spreadsheet work on your behalf.
Our …
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IBM Brings AI-Enhanced OpenShift Container Platform To Power Systems
December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Given that Big Blue owns Red Hat, any Red Hat software that runs on X86 or Arm machinery should eventually make its way onto IBM’s own Power processors and their Power Systems servers. But, it takes time to do this, of course, and some Red Hat software is more important to the Power Systems based than other systems software.
In announcement letter AD25-1628, dated November 25 when IT Jungle was, like many of you, getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, IBM said that it had Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus ready to go on its Power Systems iron. The …
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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 …
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A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End
November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.
Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …
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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 …
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Gartner Raises 2025 IT Spending Forecast, Puts Out 2026 Prediction
November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you have your boss pegging your pay increases to the growth in the IT market, you are going to outpace the inflation that is helping to buoy IT spending worldwide. The spreadsheet wizards and economists at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending for the third time this year for 2025, and have also recently put out an initial forecast for what IT spending will look like in 2026.
As a refresher, here is how Gartner pegged IT spending by the major categories back in its July forecast for both 2024, which had ended, and for 2025, …
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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 …
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Cloud Revenues Saved By The GenAI Boom
November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Growth in spending by end users on the clouds was slowing and slowing even more as time went by as we expect in a mature and competitive market from the end of 2021 through the end of 2022. And based on the trends that were happening at that time, about this time growth would have probably slowed to maybe 2X to 3X of the growth in global gross domestic product, which is how you know (in my opinion) how a subset of the IT market is mature.
IT markets tend to always grow faster than GDP, unless something weird is …
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