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When IBM showtime announced OpenPower several years agone, information technology seemed like a lamentable cease to 1 of the only x86-alternative architectures still left standing. More recently, we've seen renewed interest from various companies, several vendor announcements, increased uptake for GPU and AI applications cheers to the Nvidia-designed NVLink and its superior bandwidth compared with PCI Express, and, in at least some cases, higher overall performance.

EETimes has a profile of Power9's overall market operation as part of the Facebook Open Compute Project. Google, Alibaba, and Tencent are all working on Power9 systems, with Tencent claiming that Power9 offers xxx percent more functioning than an equivalent x86 installation while using less rack space and fewer servers. There are also reports of Power9 being quietly prepped for deployment by at least i major web company and for a major data heart customer. IBM reportedly wants to win at least 20 percent of the Linux server market for >$5,000 servers and the visitor has put a major button backside Power9 as a GPU compute and artificial intelligence research platform, with the launch of its AC922 "Newell" platform late in 2022.

AC922

This new platform offers a two-socket Power9 server (upwardly to 22 cores per socket in the h2o-cooled variant and 20 in the air-cooled arrangement) with up to vi Nvidia Volta GPUs. Meanwhile, NVLink 2.0 doubles bidirectional bandwidth to 75GB/s in both directions betwixt the diverse GPUs equally well every bit the CPU GPU linkages.

Power9-1

IBM expects to keep refining Power9 with both scale-up and scale-out versions of the platform through 2022, with significantly more than bandwidth arriving in later versions of the system and, one assumes, significantly college power consumption every bit well. EETimes notes that while earlier versions of the Power9 roadmap included 10nm and 7nm versions, they're nowhere to be found on subsequently versions of the roadmap.

1Powerroadmapx800

One major shift over the last few years has been the Power customers themselves. Initially, IBM thought it might create an ecosystem around the Power architecture, with chip designers taking out licenses to build compatible products. Then far, the chip is finding much more success with OEMs than design firms, just information technology's curious that the plans for a 10nm and 7nm version of Power have vanished from existing roadmaps. Ane possibility is that IBM believes it makes more sense to focus on refining its CPUs and platforms on a unmarried, stable, mature 14nm node for now, rather than trying to shift to bleeding-border nodes. Power9 CPUs are extremely complex and aren't great designs for bringing up new nodes.

IBM isn't going to break the hammerlock x86 has on the general server marketplace, but whatever gains information technology can carve out in fields similar bogus intelligence or machine learning could lead to further gains as those markets mature. Equally x86'southward ain long-term authorisation illustrates, beingness the default solution is a powerful advantage. If IBM tin can keep Power competitive in this space, it has a fighting run a risk to carve out a meaningful market, even if x86 owns the more full general server manufacture.