Just two days after jettisoning its last x86-oriented division to Lenovo, IBM has unveiled the first servers based on the new Power8 CPU architecture. Somewhat unusually, IBM’s press release for the new servers directly attacks both Intel’s “closed and proprietary” way of doing business and its products (IBM says Power8-based systems are nearly 20% better on price-performance than x86-based systems). Is IBM all bark and no bite? Or does the Power8 architecture and and OpenPower Foundation (which now has 59 members) actually stand a chance against Intel’s server monopoly? Let’s dive in and take a closer a look.
The new servers
First, the new Power8 servers: There’s the mid-range scale-out S822L and S824L, which can support up to two 12-core Power8 chips each (pictured above), and the high-end Enterprise E870 and E880, which can accommodate up to 8 and 16 Power8 chips respectively. The top-end E880, with its full complement of 16 Power8 chips, has 192 CPU cores — and 16 terabytes of RAM, 32 third-gen PCIe x16 slots, and lots of other goodies. There’s even space for a DVD drive. And don’t forget that each Power8 CPU core has 8-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) — so, on the 16-chip system you actually have up to 1536 concurrent threads. | |
| An IBM Power8 E880 server rack |
For a lot more details on the Power8 architecture, CAPI, and the OpenPower Foundation, read our featured story: IBM unveils Power8 and OpenPower pincer attack on Intel’s x86 server monopoly. The new Power8 servers are available from October 31. Pricing starts at around $8,000 for a single-socket S812L; for a 16-socket system, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, I imagine. (If a single Power8 chip was available for OEMs, it would probably be priced at around $5,000.)
Taking on Intel
The whole point of the Power8 architecture and the OpenPower Foundation is to take down Intel’s dominance of the server market — similar to how AMD and a few others are trying (and failing) to poke a hole in the low-power server market with ARM-based chips. Gartner estimates that Intel provided 92% of all new server chips in 2013 — and IBM, and OpenPower members like Nvidia and Samsung, want a piece of that incredibly lucrative pie. I’m not a business analyst, but such a pincer attack seems like a smart way to go about weakening Intel’s position — and it certainly helps that the Power8 chip is monstrously powerful, and that the OpenPower Foundation has almost every big hardware player except for Intel on its roster. | |
| Intel’s answer to the ARM threat: Bringing 15-core and 18-core Xeon parts down to mainstream servers (EP, as opposed to EX) |
It will take a lot to unseat Intel, though. Something in the region of 95% of all servers in the world are powered by Intel-x86 chips — and thus, most of the software and hardware ecosystems are also x86-oriented. Power, Sparc, and other RISC-type chip architectures have been trending towards obsolescence for a long, long time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that IBM — which itself is quite fond of closed, proprietary tech — finally opened the doors on its Power architecture to create the OpenPower Foundation. I don’t think it would be unfair to characterize this as a last-gasp effort.
But hey, if Power8 is really as powerful as IBM says, and if IBM and its OpenPower partners really are serious about bringing to market solutions that can flatten Intel/x86 in terms of performance and performance-per-watt, then maybe this will be one of the few last-gasp efforts that actually pays off. It’ll be an interesting few years, that’s for sure.
IBM unveils new Power8 servers in last-gasp effort to battle Intel’s x86 dominion