IBM Power servers continue to be the trusted foundation for hybrid IT infrastructure, delivering exceptional performance both on-premises and in the cloud. IBM Power processors are among the most consistent and best performing for wide ranges of workloads, including Java workloads, in the industry. Customers and partners alike highly value Power servers' corner-stone characteristics: robustness, reliability, scalability, and security. With the IBM Power11 servers' general availability in July 2025, this long history and tradition is expected not only to continue, but also flourish and improve further as well.
- IBM Semeru Runtime 21.0.7
- IBM Semeru Runtime 17.0.15
- IBM Semeru Runtime 11.0.27
- IBM Semeru Runtime 8 jdk8u452
- IBM SDK, Java Technology Edition, 8 SR8 FP45
If for any reason you are not able to upgrade the Semeru Runtimes JDK installed in your environment, you can avoid possible performance issues from an untuned JDK by running your Power11 system in Power10-compatibility mode.
Once you have Semeru Runtimes upgrade in place, there is absolutely no need to modify application code for reaping the performance benefits offered by Power11 servers, such that customers could be on the quickest go-to-market track possible for their products and Java applications targeting Power11. This also accelerates time-to-value of clients' hardware investments, while minimizing development and testing efforts. Based on extensive data gathered from various Java applications, when running with IBM Semeru Runtime 11.0.13 on Power10 versus IBM Semeru Runtime 21.0.7 on Power11, users should anticipate a performance enhancement of up to 15% in general, under identical resource settings (such as CPU count and physical memory size). Both Power10 and Power11 machines under tests below have identical configuration: 8-core/64-vCPUs with 128GB physical memory. When using only a subset of machine resources for the tests, identical subsets on both machines are used for fair and valid comparisons.
Performance of Java server workloads 2,3
The Java server benchmark was designed to evaluate the performance of servers running enterprise Java applications. It simulates a multi-threaded, compute-intensive workload, mimicking an online retailer with point-of-sale transactions, inventory management, and data mining operations. It assesses performance under various conditions, including different response-time requirements, and is used to analyze system bottlenecks at hardware, OS, JVM, and application layers. There are two key performance metrics measured: Peak throughput represents the maximum throughput achievable by the system, while throughput under SLA (Service Level Agreement for response-time) represents the throughput under a specific response-time limitation with a certain level of resource contention.
With Power11's better memory latency and Semeru Runtimes' improvements resulting in shorter garbage-collection duration in particular, we are seeing peak throughput improved by up to 21% from Power10 to Power11, while throughput under SLA achieved up to a whopping 55% uplift at the same time.
Performance of Application Server Middleware 4,5
Application servers are crucial for building and deploying modern web applications, providing the necessary infrastructure and services to handle complex business logic and user interactions efficiently and securely, either on-premises or in the cloud. IBM WebSphere Liberty is a lightweight, cloud-native Java application server designed for rapid development and deployment of modern Java enterprise applications, as well as microservices and cloud-native applications. Liberty is known for its ultra-fast startup time, low memory footprint, and modular architecture based on features. Liberty is also optimized for use in containerized environments like Kubernetes.
DayTrader7 is an application built around the paradigm of an online stock trading system. The application allows users to login, view their portfolio, look up stock quotes, and buy or sell stock shares. With the aid of a web-based load driver such as Apache JMeter, the real-world workload provided by DayTrader7 can be used to measure and compare the performance of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application servers offered by a variety of vendors. DayTrader7's design spans Java EE 7, including the WebSockets specification. Other Java EE features include JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, JPA, JDBC, JSF, CDI, Bean Validation, JSON, JMS, MDBs, and transactions (synchronous and asynchronous/2-phase commit). Throughput is measured running DayTrader7 on IBM WebSphere Liberty, with IBM Db2 database as the backend.
Due to the complexity of these three-tier environments, it is typically difficult to achieve full-stack scalability and/or performance improvements. The fact that we are seeing double-digit better results for both applications on Power11 just reaffirms the position that IBM WebSphere Liberty with Semeru Runtimes on Power11 provides an excellent IT infrastructural foundation for business applications.
The DaCapo benchmark suite is a collection of open-source, real-world Java applications designed for performance analysis and benchmarking. It incorporates the latest Java features and uses popular Java frameworks as well. It's a valuable tool for researchers and developers working with Java, particularly in areas like garbage collection, memory management, and compiler optimization. The suite includes various applications with non-trivial memory loads, providing a realistic environment for evaluating Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and system performance.
Dacapo benchmark suite spans over a wide range of real Java SE application scenarios: cassandra, biojava, h2o, eclipse, sunflow, spring, and tomcat, etc. These cover a lot of ground in popular Java programming frameworks from database, bio-genome, AI, image processing, to microservice middleware web-application. The fact that we can achieve 14.4% geomean uplift generation to generation indeed is a significant demonstration of close collaboration between Semeru Runtimes and Power11 hardware teams. This result speaks volumes of Semeru Runtimes' versatility, its capability to leverage Power11 strengths, and its own sustained performance improvements over the years.
Enterprise data are the best fuel for accurate and differentiated AI that is relevant to your industry and your clients to drive competitive advantage. However, 90% of enterprise data are unstructured data which have largely remained inaccessible and underutilized for Gen AI. IBM watsonx.data is the only hybrid, open-data lakehouse for enterprise AI and analytics. So now, you can access, prepare, and deliver your enterprise unstructured data to achieve 40% more accurate AI than conventional RAG with IBM watsonx.data. We picked one application sample as the benchmark for performance comparison: TPC-H on Apache Spark with Amazon S3 data.