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IBM Announces Power9 Servers

Accepted submission by takyon at 2017-12-09 15:43:16
Hardware

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

IBM Announces 'Game-Changing' Power9 Servers For AI [tomshardware.com]

IBM has announced its Power Systems Servers, which will be the first to sport the new Power9 processor, a chip that has been in development for four years.

The computing giant built the processor for compute-intensive AI workloads, and it claims the Power9 systems will have the ability to improve the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x. As a result, companies will be able to make more accurate AI applications in a faster manner.

The Power9-based AC922 Power Systems will be the world's first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation Nvidia NVLink, and OpenCAPI--which IBM says that, when combined, can accelerate data movement, calculated at a rate that's 9.5x faster than PCI-E 3.0 based x86 systems.

Also at HPCwire [hpcwire.com]:

A lot is riding on the success of Power9 after Power8 failed to generate the kind of profits that IBM had hoped for. There was growth in Power8's first year, said King, but after that sales tailed off. He added that capabilities like Nutanix and building PowerAI and other software based solutions on top of it have led to a bit of a rebound. "It's still negative but it's low negative," he said, "but it's sequentially grown quarter to quarter in the last three quarters, since Bob Picciano [SVP of IBM Cognitive Systems] came on."

Several IBM reps we spoke with acknowledged that pricing – or at least pricing perception – was a problem for Power8. "For our traditional market I think pricing was competitive; for some of the new markets that we're trying to get into, like the hyperscaler datacenters, I think we've got some work to do," said King. "It's really a TCO and a price-performance competitiveness versus price only. And we think we're going to have a much better price performance competitiveness with Power9 in the hyperscalers and some of the low-end Linux spaces that are really the new markets."

POWER9 [wikipedia.org] at Wikipedia.

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