IBM Power9

The processor is created especially for work with intensive computing loadings of artificial intelligence technologies and is capable to improve sharply time of a training of frameworks of deep learning.

Power9 in one picture is infographics of TAdviser

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Development History

2018

Correction of vulnerabilities

In January, 2018 IBM released for Power9 processors the program updates eliminating sensational vulnerabilities of Meltdown and Spectre which are also noticed in many chips of Intel and AMD. IBM promised to complete elimination of vulnerabilities in the products to the middle of February.^[1]

2017

Output of the first servers to Power9

At the end of 2017 IBM  provided the first servers based on  the Power9 processor. Power Systems AC922 equipment with   the buses PCI Express, NVlink 2.0 from  Nvidia and  the OpenCAPI interface  is optimized for the workloads connected with artificial intelligence.

IBM notes that Power9 allows to accelerate trainings of frameworks of deep training of training almost four times thanks to what clients will be able quicker to create more exact AI-applications. 

IBM Power9 processor

In Kinetica company (the DBMS developer, the using GPU) claim that when using Power9 processors their system works 1.8 times quicker, than on servers with Power8 chips. AC922 system on the basis of Power9 was projected for performance improvement on platforms of artificial intelligence Chainer, TensorFlow and Caffe.

IBM also uses Power9 processors  in the instruments of deep learning PowerAI Distributed Deep Learning, PowerAI, Linux and  other frameworks. They  are the cornerstone of the Summit and Sierra supercomputers  of the U.S. Department of Energy  and also are used in  data centers of Google. Chips and systems using them became a part of joint work of participants of the OpenPower Foundation organization which includes IBM, Google, Mellanox, Nvidia, etc.

In 2018 IBM is going to release servers in which the version of Power9 configured for work in the environment of AIX/System i and supporting multithreaded SMT8 mode with eight flows and also means of virtualization of PowerVM is installed. These processors have up to 12 cores, but can work at higher clock rate.

Support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 

In November, 2017 the Red Hat company announced support of Power9 processors in Enterprise Linux 7.4. This operating system of the first became compatible to new processors of IBM.^[2]

Plans for release of Power9

On February 10, 2017 the IBM company announced release schedules of the Power9 processor in the second half of the current year and the beginning of 2018.

Image of Power9, (2017)

It is expected that servers on Power9 platform of the lower price segment will become available in the middle of 2017. The processors with support of Linux and Unix scaled up to 24 cores with optimization on 2 sockets will be issued in 2018.

Some technical details about a product became known. Power9 include support of the NVLink 2.0 interface for connection to the central processor of graphic accelerators (GPU) providing capacity of the line to 25 Gbps. In the processor the second version of Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology for connection with chips of ASIC and FPGA at low delays is used, it will provide performance improvement of the POWER9 processor to four times^[3].

Production Power9 is organized 14-nanometer technical process. On a chip 8 billion transistors contain. Two versions of processors are developed: with support of simultaneous processing of four and eight flows of commands (SMT4 and SMT8). Power9 in option of SMT4 can execute for a cycle 64 commands, SMT8 – 128.

On the basis of this processor of IBM developed two series of the Power Systems servers – two-socket for creation of horizontally scalable computer systems and the servers expanded to 16 sockets with vertical scaling.

2016: The first details about Power9 processors

In August, 2016 IBM disclosed some details about the new Power9 processors intended for servers. The similar solutions also announced AMD. It became clear that the companies want to compete with the unconditional leader of the server market of Intel.

Power9 chips are presented in two basic versions — with 24 and 12 computing cores. In a case with the first modification by the main users there will be Internet companies which instead of live labor power select hundreds or even thousands of computers. the 12-core processor is addressed to larger systems ensuring functioning with corporate databases and start of different applications, noted the The Wall Street Journal edition.

New chips of IBM will be used together with graphic Nvidia accelerators most of which often worked before with solutions of Intel for accomplishment of the tasks connected with deep training.

IBM and AMD attack Intel in the market of processors

The output of Power9 processors to the market was originally planned for the second half of 2017. In the second quarter the same year of AMD promised to release 32-core server Zen chips. The company noted that the architecture of Zen was created from scratch, it has the updated hierarchy a cache memory, the improved prediction functions of transitions and support of simultaneous multithreading. The head of AMD Lisa Su reported that the company needed about four years and hundreds of millions dollars for development of Zen.

According to analysts, AMD just should be proved capability of the product to work in fact as well as during testing, however results of tests seem promising.

They do not need to work quicker than Intel. They just should is nearby as they can compete from the price point of view — the analyst of Linley Group Linley Gwennap considers

By estimates of researchers of IDC, from 9.81 million servers released to the world market in 2015, 98% of systems were based on processors with architecture of x86 which is advanced by Intel. Mercury Research estimates x86 share in the market of servers at 99.7% according to the results of the second quarter 2016. The expert of IDC Matthew Eastwood considers that clients need alternative suppliers.^[4]

Notes