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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 18 2020, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly

New IBM POWER10 processor has transparent memory encryption for end-to-end security - Help Net Security:

IBM revealed the next generation of its IBM POWER CPU family: IBM POWER10. Designed to offer a platform to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing, the IBM POWER10 processor uses a design focused on energy efficiency and performance in a 7nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM's roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021.

[...] IBM POWER10 is IBM's first commercialized processor built using 7nm process technology. IBM Research has been partnering with Samsung Electronics on research and development for more than a decade, including demonstration of the semiconductor industry's first 7nm test chips through IBM's Research Alliance.

[...] IBM POWER10 offers hardware memory encryption for end-to-end security and faster cryptography performance thanks to additional AES encryption engines for both today's leading encryption standards as well as anticipated future encryption protocols like quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption.

Further, to address new security considerations associated with the higher density of containers, IBM POWER10 is designed to deliver new hardware-enforced container protection and isolation capabilities co-developed with the IBM POWER10 firmware.

If a container were to be compromised, the POWER10 processor is designed to be able to prevent other containers in the same Virtual Machine (VM) from being affected by the same intrusion.

[...] In a breakthrough new technology called Memory Inception, the new processor is designed to allow any of the IBM POWER10 processor-based systems in a cluster to access and share each other's memory, creating multi-Petabyte sized memory clusters.

For both cloud users and providers, Memory Inception offers the potential to drive cost and energy savings, as cloud providers can offer more capability using fewer servers, while cloud users can lease fewer resources to meet their IT needs.

[...] With an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator, the IBM POWER10 processor is expected to achieve 10x, 15x, and 20x faster AI inference for FP32, BFloat16 and INT8 calculations respectively to improve performance for enterprise AI inference workloads as compared to IBM POWER9, helping enterprises take the AI models they trained and put them to work in the field.

[...] Samsung Electronics will manufacture the processor, combining Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing technology with IBM's CPU designs.


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  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 18 2020, @04:57PM (5 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @04:57PM (#1038414)

    IBM knows a thing or two about virtual machines. They were doing hypervisors back in the 1970s. I have a Power6 box and played with VIOS running AIX and V7R2. Very interesting stuff.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:19PM (#1038422)

    Interesting stuff is a very kind way of describing AIX.

    "It used to be said [...] that AIX looks like one space alien discovered Unix, and described it to another different space alien who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot."

    -- Paul Tomblin

    • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday August 21 2020, @12:49AM

      by epitaxial (3165) on Friday August 21 2020, @12:49AM (#1039640)

      I was surprised to see AIX using binary log files. Guess I know where Poettering stole his idea from.

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:55AM (1 child)

    by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:55AM (#1038646)

    Very cool and interesting. I've always wanted to do more IBM stuff but never get the chance.

    So since you mentioned hypervisors, somethings always kind of bugged me- why isn't that code part of an overall OS?

    My thinking is that an OS should provide better application segregation, much the way a hypervisor segregates OS instances. But why have all that overhead, and have to divvy up CPU, RAM, and HD space?

    Just wondering if you have any insight.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Friday August 21 2020, @02:09AM

      by epitaxial (3165) on Friday August 21 2020, @02:09AM (#1039668)

      That code may have been part of the VM/370 for the S/370 systems. I really don't know the details. But on my box the hardware itself seemed to be partitioned. VIOS or PowerVM whatever they call it now sets aside 2gb of memory and a small slice of cpu power to run. After deciding to go back to bare metal, booting Linux and AIX would show that 2gb of memory was missing. As far as the OS was concerned it simply wasn't there.

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:12AM

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:12AM (#1038686)

    IBM knows a thing or two about virtual machines. They were doing hypervisors back in the 1970s.

    Specifically, VM. Their OS was actually called "Virtual Machine", they pretty much invented the concept.