IBM’s plans for its Power server family promise faster and more programmable AI capabilities along with a new, more powerful processor. Highlights of the 2025 roadmap include:
- IBM’s Spyre Accelerator for AI will be part of the Power processing systems.
- The Power server line will be anchored by a new processor, the IBM Power11.
- A new AI-based assistant will aid in RPG application modernization and development.
“Jointly designed by IBM Research and IBM Infrastructure, Spyre’s architecture is designed for more efficient AI computation. Notably, the chip will send data directly from one compute engine to the next, leading to an efficient use of energy,” wrote Bargav Balakrishnan, vice president, product management, IBM Power, in a blog about the roadmap.
“This family of processors also uses a range of lower precision numeric formats (such as [AI datatypes] int4 and int8), to make running an AI model more energy efficient and far less memory intensive,” Balakrishnan stated.
According to IBM, the Spyre Accelerator significantly boosts speed and accuracy of AI processing capabilities for the Power server. By offloading AI tasks to the accelerator, servers can achieve performance gains, leading to faster response times and improved overall system efficiency.
IBM earlier this year introduced the with a 2U rack-mounted server designed for running AI inferencing workloads in remote office or edge locations outside of corporate data centers.
The 1-socket, half-wide, Power10 processor-based system promises a threefold performance increase per core compared to the Power S812 it basically replaces, IBM stated. Running IBM AIX, IBM i, Linux, or VIOS operating systems, the S1012 supports in-core AI inferencing and machine learning with the MMA feature. Each Power S1012 includes four MMAs per core to support AI inferencing.
Developing RPG
The chief application development system widely used by Power servers and its ecosystem is RPG. IBM said it is working with i community developers to come up with AI-based assistants that could help enterprise customers and developers use genAI based code optimized for RPG development.
In 2025, IBM intends to deliver a code assistant for RPG – a generative AI tool which helps developers of IBM i software understand existing RPG code, create new RPG function using natural language description, and automatically generate test cases for RPG code, IBM stated.
Power future lies in chiplets
The last component of IBM’s Power roadmap involved hardware directions after the Power11 server. Specifically, IBM said future Power systems will migrate to a chiplet-based architecture after Power11, according to Starke.
“The idea is to grow effective silicon content per socket, while controlling costs and managing energy and cooling,” Starke stated. “We also discovered that a chiplet-based design will enable improved system topologies, paving the way for continued improvements in large system scaling for multiple generations to come.”
Chiplet designs typically allow for modular design, allowing specific components of a system to be mixed and matched as needed. Intel, AMD, Xilinx and others currently build chiplet systems.
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