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IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First

September 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

After a long, long wait – it has been nearly four years since the first Power9 machine was launched in the “Witherspoon” Power AC922 supercomputing node back in December 2017 based on the 24-core “Nimbus” Power9 processor and just over three years since the high-end “Fleetwood” Power E980 system debuted with the 12-core “Cumulus” Power9 variant – the first machines out of IBM based on the Power10 processor are being unveiled.

The expected three-year cadence between processor generations set by IBM a long time ago has worked out almost precisely for high-end Power Systems shops, with today’s launch of the …
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Powers Of Ten

May 11, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The one thing that is easy to predict about designing and manufacturing a server processor is that no matter who is doing it, no matter what process in what decade, it is always hard and things always run late. Whether or not we on the outside world can see this, it remains true just the same. And that is because in any given era, with any given chip etching technique or chip architecture, server processors are always pushing up to the very limits of what is possible. And things go wrong.

This is why it is a good idea to …
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I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …
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IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.

But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …
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IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …
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IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First

Powers Of Ten

I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

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