Computing for a new era – IBM POWER9
No matter what industry you’re in, technology is transforming business as we know it—generating massive volumes of data and new ways to explore it, driving more digital operations, and creating higher customer expectations. Faced with this new reality, more and more organisations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to produce game-changing insights into operations and drive better business outcomes.
As business demand for these technologies intensifies, so too has the pressure on IT systems. This is felt even in organisations that have no current plans to adopt the new technologies themselves. Today’s workloads require tremendous processing power and extreme speed whether they are traditional core systems or cutting-edge new developments—and it’s a tough challenge for IT teams to deliver on these demands while keeping security, availability and—above all—cost efficiency in mind.
With complexity generally rising as infrastructures are scaled out, it is becoming harder and harder for new generations of systems to provide the same cost and performance gains that they’ve delivered historically. It’s clearly time for a new approach to system design. And IBM has delivered just this with its new POWER9 systems.
Unleashing next-generation capabilities with POWER9
The first processor built specifically for AI workloads, IBM POWER9 incorporates advanced I/O subsystem technology, including PCIe Gen4, NVIDIA NVLink and OpenCAPI. These interfaces combine to form an “information superhighway” that decouples processing and empowers advanced accelerators to digest and analyse massive data sets.
The result is truly differentiated performance: compared to x86 systems, POWER9 offers four times more threads for high-performance cores, more than five times greater I/O bandwidth and over two times more memory bandwidth.
And if you already count on Power Systems to support core IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads, then POWER9 continues to lead the market when it comes to performance, scalability and cost-efficiency. With improved per-core performance, POWER9 can cut your software licensing costs and deliver leading transactional performance in a smaller physical footprint—helping you run leaner and meaner.
Ready to harness this transformational technology yourself, but not sure where to start? Northdoor’s Power Systems experts can work with you to build a business case for investing in IBM POWER9, select and deploy the appropriate systems, and provide ongoing management and support. And even if you’re not planning to change the world, but just to keep your core systems running, let Northdoor show you how POWER9 can dramatically accelerate your existing workloads and reduce your operational costs.
To find out more about how Northdoor can help you make the most of all that POWER9 has to offer, contact us.
Read Tom’s blog: IBM Power9 – Is this the best Microprocessors ever?
