Power E870 Archives

Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time

November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.

But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …
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Balancing Supply And Demand For Impending Big Power10 Iron

August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive …
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We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …
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IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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More Vintage Power Systems Stuff Gets The Plug Pulled

November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We are well into the Power9 era and looking ahead to the Power10 and Power11 era, so it is no surprise at all that IBM is looking to streamline its product catalog and empty out its barns of old equipment. In announcement letter 919-139, which somehow slipped our attention two weeks ago on October 22, a whole bunch of Power Systems stuff got the axe, with withdrawal dates ranging from right now until February 2020.

On October 22, IBM i 6.1.1, with its machine code, will no longer be available for ordering on a slew of machines. This is …
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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 Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …
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