There is a lot of buzz in the industry regarding IBM’s April 28 announcement of IBM Power8, but there are still many questions. IBM is saying that Power8 will be available to the general public in June, but for enterprise clients, they should not expect it until later in the year.
IBM is referring to this Power8 launch as a first generation system. In an interview by IBM Systems Magazine, Doug Balog, IBM’s GM of Power Systems, explained that Power8 is “grounded in the open innovation that’s coming from the OpenPOWER Foundation” and “it is the most open server platform in the market now”. The interview goes on to discuss how the Power8 technology can handle big data analytics, while also be a cloud-based system.
Cloud Times also published an interesting article on the announcement, discussing the $2.4 billion investment that IBM made over the past three years in development of its power servers leveraging hundreds of patents. The article’s author, Saroj Kar, states that the fact that the Power8 chips are only one square inch in size, including 4 billion transistors and contain more than 17 km high-speed copper lines, is the first truly groundbreaking progress in high-end server technology in decades.
As the team at ABC Services continues to talk to IBM over the next few weeks and learns more about the Power8 system, we will continue to update this blog with relevant data, technical tips and more. Stay tuned.
