By William Starke, IBM Power Processor Chief Architect and Distinguished Engineer
IBM has engaged into co-creation activities with our clients, business partners, and ISV’s to drive focus toward the most pressing needs of the Power community. Power systems are ideal for mission critical environments, providing exceptional resiliency against unplanned system outages, robust performance, and scale to run the most demanding workloads, and best-of-breed security to protect data and business processes against bad actors. Our clients have consistently stated these are the leading reasons why they value the platform.
Next year, in addition to many other new offerings, we plan to deliver systems built with the Power11 processor. The next generation IBM Power11 system is built with innovations in the processor, system, and stack levels to help enterprises propel digital transformation initiatives for their mission-critical infrastructure.
The Power11 processor is designed to deliver higher clock speeds and can add up to 25% more cores per processor chip than comparable IBM Power10 systems. The Power11 processor builds upon the key capabilities we delivered with Power10 including stronger reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) characteristics, better energy efficiency and energy management, and improved quantum-safe security. Beyond the processor itself, we are introducing the following improvements to packaging, memory architecture and AI acceleration:
- Packaging Innovation: The Power11 processor will leverage new integrated stack capacitor (ISC) technology and advanced 2.5D packaging along with innovations in cooling such as improved heatsinks and more efficient fans to optimize energy delivery, improve thread and core strength and increase system capacity.
- Enhanced System Architecture: The robust memory architecture for Power11 systems will be based on the recently released DDR5 DDIMMs and enhanced OMI interfaces which enable improved memory reliability, capacity, and bandwidth. Given that OMI is technology agnostic, the Power11 portfolio built on the Power11 processor will also support OMI DDR4 memory migrated from Power10 high-end systems, enabling clients to protect their investments in memory technology.
- AI Acceleration: We continue to support a range of emerging enterprise AI use cases with the MMA (Matrix-Math Accelerator) architecture. Improvements to Power11 processor core strength and system capacity will improve the performance of the MMA for inferencing workloads. Furthermore, IBM intends to incorporate the IBM Spyre accelerator into Power11 offerings to provide additional AI inferencing capabilities. Working together, IBM Power processors and the IBM Spyre accelerator will enable the next generation infrastructure to scale demanding AI workloads for businesses.
What’s ahead for IBM Power
As the physics constraints of Moore’s Law start to limit semiconductor technology improvements, we see the industry begin to replace traditional designs with new packaging technologies to augment their processor and accelerator architectures. Ranging from chiplet-based approaches to 3D chip stacking architectures, these technologies show some promise of helping the industry move forward.
Due to IBM’s premier signaling technology and packaging advantages, using a chiplet-based design for Power will provide substantially greater value than that enjoyed by the best-of-breed in the industry: the means to grow effective silicon content per socket, while controlling costs and managing energy and cooling. We also discovered that a chiplet-based design will enable improved system topologies, paving the way for continued improvements in large system scaling for multiple generations to come.
Power systems will migrate to a chiplet-based architecture after Power11 which will provide a strong foundation for multiple future generations of Power. Looking beyond Power11, the strengths of Power are well-aligned with future technology trends and leverage the innovative research and development within IBM.
Reach out to your IBM Power representative or Business Partner to discuss how we can keep making progress together.