Big news, IBM announced their new POWER10 processor, and they are integrating advanced functionalities like increased efficiency, built-in security, and Memory inception which enables to share memory between servers.
On 17 August 2020 IBM has revealed their new POWER10 CPU's focusing on cloud workloads, all while it has not lost sight of on-premise compute needs.
What is new?
Some of the innovations this new processor will bring are:
Efficiency with the new 7nm processor
This anticipated improvement in capacity is designed to allow IBM POWER10-based systems to support up to 3x increases in users, workloads and OpenShift container density for hybrid cloud workloads as compared to IBM POWER9-based systems.
Shared memory
With a breakthrough new technology called Memory Inception, the processor allows multiple Power10-based systems to share multiple petabytes of memory, which can improve cloud capacity and economics for memory-intensive applications from vendors like SAP and SAS Institute, as well as inferencing for large-scale AI models.
Easily said: Instead of having to put a lot of memory into every box so that you can make sure you could meet the peak demands of that box, you could actually plug in a more reasonable amount of memory in each box, saving lots and lots of infrastructure costs. And then, in the case where you have a spike demand for memory, you can borrow that memory from your neighbors.
Security
Power10 also comes new security features like new ASES encryption engines as well as transparent memory encryption, which comes with no performance impact and enables systems to protect containers from each other within the same virtual machine.
There’s also built in noisy neighbor protection for multi-tenant cloud workloads. To ensure cloud workload security, the processor supports secure containers. The architecture has increased flexibility with its PowerVM hypervisor and memory pooling aggregation to handle a wide variety of workloads with petabyte system memory support.
AI
As AI continues to be more and more embedded into business applications in transactional and analytical workflows, AI inferencing is becoming central to enterprise applications. The IBM POWER10 processor is designed to enhance in-core AI inferencing capability without requiring additional specialized hardware.
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.
