The Most Powerful Server Embiggens a Bit with Power11

Summary

If you need a big, badass box that can support tens of terabytes of memory, dozens of PCI-Express peripheral slots, thousands of directly attached storage devices, all feeding into hundreds of cores that can span that memory footprint with lots of bandwidth, you do not have a lot of options. This is one reason why IBM still has a Power Systems server business based on its Power family of RISC processors, which support IBM’s homegrown variant of Unix, its proprietary and venerable IBM i (formerly OS/400), and Linux as their operating systems. And the profitability of that big iron and the utter dependence that customers who need big NUMA machines have on these boxes to support massive transactional database management systems and the applications that wrap around them, is why Big Blue can still afford to invest in its Power processors. Hence, the launch of the Power11 processor last week, which will ship across a range of entry, midrange, and enterprise servers starting on July 25. The Power11 chip is, in a way, a deep bin sort of the Power10 chip that first debuted in September 2021. The Power10 chip had been through the wringer, with canceled 10 nanometer and then 7 nanometer manufacturing processes from chip foundry partner GlobalFoundries. These same process transitions were an epic fail at Intel as well, and delay after delay in manufacturing gave AMD the change to leapfrog the Xeon X86 server chips with its compatible Epycs and AMD has been gaining share since. GlobalFoundries took over IBM Microelectronics in October 2014 and assumed the productization of Big Blue’s 14 nanometer process that was, er, in process at the time. As best as we can figure, the Power9 chip that was etched in 14 nanometers by GlobalFoundries was about a year late to market, and it took IBM a full year to ramp up its production in 2018. (The initial Power9 delivered in late 2017 went into the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and into the “Sierra” supercomputer at ...