Power 9 May Dent x86 Servers

LAS VEGAS — Ten system makers showed servers using IBM’s Power 9 processor here amid expectations of rising sales for the x86 alternative. Their momentum will make, at best, a small dent in the market that Intel dominates, but their targets include one of its most lucrative segments — machine-learning jobs in the data center.

Google, an early partner in IBM’s Open Power initiative, announced that it is expanding its tests of Power 9 systems. An engineer leading the effort said that, given the search giant’s investments in the architecture, it hopes to move at least some Power systems into production use this year.

China’s Alibaba and Tencent are also testing Power 9. Tencent said that Power 9 is delivering 30% more performance than the x86 while using fewer servers and racks.

At least one web giant is expected to announce production use of Power 9 systems this year. In addition, at least one top-tier server maker is quietly delivering Power systems to one data center, said Ken King, who manages the Open Power initiative for Big Blue.

IBM’s corporate aim is to win within four years at least 20% of the sockets for Linux servers sold for $5,000 or more, said King. IBM’s Power roadmap calls for annual processor upgrades in 14 nm through 2019 and a Power 10 slated for some time after 2020 — leaving room for a possible 7-nm chip in 2020, shown two years ago.

Power 9 should do better than its predecessors given its costs, bandwidth, and ease of porting. Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50% compared to the Power 8, said IBM’s partners.

The proprietary NVLink 2.0 that can connect Power 9 to multiple Nvidia Volta GPUs provides a bandwidth edge over the x86. Many of the new Power 9 systems aim to leverage the Nvidia GPU’s dominance in training neural networks to win adoption in large data center operators for AI jobs.

Indeed, one of three areas where Google sees promise for Power 9 is as a superior host teamed up with an accelerator such as its TPU. Power 9 also supports many cores and threads, factors closely tied to performance on Google search tasks, said Maire Mahony, a Google system engineer who serves as treasurer for the Open Power Foundation.

At a separate event, IBM announced that it is making its Power 9 servers with Nvidia GPUs available as a cloud service for deep-learning jobs. It claimed that four of the new servers beat 89 Google Cloud servers by 39x in a terabyte-sized AI advertising benchmark.

The shift with Power 8 to an x86 like little-endian structure is giving the architecture a software boost. Developers said that Linux x86 applications can now be recompiled to run on Power, sometimes with no other changes.

Next page: A short tour of the latest systems