• 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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• 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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• The Power And Storage Price Wiggling Continues – Again

  September 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again . . . again. The people in charge of setting global prices for Power Systems and Storage products are rejiggering prices. In announcement letter AD25-1477, dated September 1 and effective on October 1, prices are changing in global markets due to changes in the foreign exchange rates between the United States and those countries.

  To be specific, the following countries are seeing the following price changes:

  • Japan, 3.5 percent
  • India, 2.1 percent
  • Philippines, 1.4 percent
  • Hong Kong, 1.2 percent
  • New Zealand, 0.6 percent

  The interesting bit is that back in early July, IBM had cut prices …

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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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• 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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• Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming

  March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.

  In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.

  Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …

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• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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• IBM Tweaks Power10 Hardware: Fatter Memory, Other Stuff

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We haven’t seen a lot of hardware announcements this year from Big Blue for the Power Systems platform, and you really should not expect much in the way of new hardware when Power11 systems are expected to be launched in 2025 and the Power10 machines have been in the field since late 2021 for the Power E1080 and since July 2022 for the rest of the line.

  To be fair, we did have the entry “Bonnell” Power S1012 machine come out in May this year. So it has not been a total drought. But hardware launches are not on an …

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• What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At

  May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.

  After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012

  May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.

  Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …

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