Stefan Mileschin

All your datacentres should belong to Big Blue

IBM is quietly confident that its new POWER chip can sweep ARM and x86 out of the datacentre market.

At the OpenPOWER Summit in Las Vegas, IBM was pushing its POWER9 and new OpenPOWER-based products. Google has signed up POWER into "Google's Data Center" which is the most significant deal so far for OpenPOWER.

For those who came in late, the POWER architecture’s most significant advantage in the data centre is its acceleration capabilities- GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs, and ASICs with added memory coherence features. Add-in cards or chips on POWER architecture give machine learning, big data, security and networks workloads super-human powers over straight CPU acceleration.

The new POWER9 can manage Nvidia NVLink, OpenCAPI, and PCIe Gen4. It also has four times the number of threads per core and up to 9.5 times more memory bandwidth than x86 and was built from the ground up for big data, AI and ML workloads.

New POWER servers were announced at the summit, from consortium members Atos, Gigabyte, Hitachi, Inspur, Inventec, Rackspace, Raptor, Wistron, and others. Additionally, new OpenCAPI devices were announced from Alpha-Data, Amphenol, Cavium, Mellanox, Nallatech, Rambus, and Xilinx, which seek to capitalize on the significant memory bandwidth advantage of POWER9. Broadcom Limited, Eiditicom and NEC all announced new PCIe Gen4 devices, which they claim will accelerate compute, networking, and storage processes on OpenPower platforms. On the software front, the event also saw a slew of new OpenPOWER-compatible offerings from companies such as brytlyt, Elinar Oy, ISVs H20, MapD, and others, many of which are focused on AI and modern data workloads—POWER9’s bread and butter. I will be diving into the show to get details on all of these new offerings.

https://fudzilla.com/news/processors...the-datacentre