• 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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• 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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• Power Systems Grows Nicely In Q3, Looks To Grow For All 2025, Too

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a funny thing, or maybe not. In its conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the financial results for its third quarter ended in September, neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, said “Power” or “Power Systems” or “Power11” or anything directly relating to IBM i or AIX. Nary a peep, even though the Power11 upgrade cycle has begun in earnest and it looks like growth was pretty good in the third quarter and will be decent for all of 2025.

  For a long time now, Big Blue …

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• Sundry IBM i And Power Stack Announcements For Your Consideration

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is always a little mop up after major IBM i and Power Systems announcements, and there is usually a trickle of announcements that are not tied to the bi-annual launches of Technology Refreshes, which we generally expect in April and October. This latest cycle is no exception, and we have the mop and bucket out to finish out the current cycle.

  In announcement letter AD25-0006, IBM says that it will allow customers to mix and match shared utility capacity for latency compute and main memory activated using Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 om-site capacity on demand with pay per …

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• A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power

  October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.

  Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …

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• Stacking Up Power11 Entry Server Performance To Older Iron

  October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are heading into the fall and if you have budget set aside for a new system or an upgrade, now is the time to start thinking about spending it. For customers buying mainstream P10-class and P20-class systems, the Power11 machines that have been out for a few months now and are the machines you will need to consider. And if you have older Power8 or Power9 iron, you might even be considering an upgrade to a Power10.

  With all of this in mind, we have put together the mother of all performance tables to compare the current 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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• 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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