Thursday, December 7, 2017

IBM unveils POWER9 server with PCIe 4.0

IBM unveiled its next-generation Power Systems Servers based on its newly designed POWER9 processor and designed for compute-intensive AI workloads and frameworks, such as Chainer, TensorFlow and Caffe, as well as accelerated databases such as Kinetica.

The new POWER9-based AC922 Power Systems are the first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation NVIDIA NVLink and OpenCAPI, which combined can accelerate data movement, calculated at 9.5x faster than PCI-E 3.0 based x86 systems.


IBM calculates that its new POWER9 systems are capable of improving the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x.

“Google is excited about IBM's progress in the development of the latest POWER technology," said Bart Sano, VP of Google Platforms "The POWER9 OpenCAPI Bus and large memory capabilities allow for further opportunities for innovation in Google data centers." 

"We’ve built a game-changing powerhouse for AI and cognitive workloads,” said Bob Picciano, SVP of IBM Cognitive Systems. “In addition to arming the world’s most powerful supercomputers, IBM POWER9 Systems is designed to enable enterprises around the world to scale unprecedented insights, driving scientific discovery enabling transformational business outcomes across every industry.”