Announcing IBM Power E1080: engineered for agility

By September 8, 2021

IBM Power E1080 mainframe

Organizations around the world are navigating constant and rapid changes to their operations and customer demand. They want IT infrastructure to help them be agile and flexible, efficient, and cyber resilient. It should help them to predict marketplace changes and respond at near real-time. While this requires their data to transform into value quickly, the security of sensitive data remains a key concern with increased ransomware and malware attacks. As organizations modernize their infrastructure, IBM is addressing these requirements with the new IBM Power E1080, the first in a generation of servers based on the Power10 processor.

IBM Power E1080 is engineered for agility. It supports IT modernization with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience1. Here is how it is designed to deliver on the key enterprise needs:

Respond faster to business demands

Power E1080 delivers scalability and efficiency.

  • World record SAP SD-two tier benchmark with 8 sockets that beats the best 16 socket results of x86 environment2
  • 2.5X performance per core than x86 Xeon Platinum3

What if you can get this performance with a lower energy footprint? With the revolutionary 7nm Power10 processor, workloads that run on a Power E980 will consume 33% lower energy when run on the Power E10804.

IBM Power10 generation of servers is designed to make technology consumption a frictionless experience. With Hybrid Cloud Credits, enterprises can procure pay-per-use capacity that can be deployed across Power Private Cloud and Power Virtual Server. The architectural consistency across these environments gives the flexibility to deploy where you want and when you want without requiring additional middleware or application re-factoring.

Protect data from core to cloud

With data residing in an increasingly distributed environment, you cannot set a perimeter to it anymore. This reinforces the need for layered security across IT stack. Power10 family of servers introduces a new layer of defense with transparent memory encryption5. All data in memory remains encrypted when in transit between memory and processor. Since this capability is enabled at the silicon level, there is no additional management setup and performance impact. Power10 also includes 4X more crypto engines in every core compared to Power96 to accelerate encryption performance across the stack. For example, the widely used AES encryption performance is improved by 2.5X7 over Power E980.

With these innovations along with new in-core defense for Return-Oriented Programming attacks and support for Post Quantum Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption, IBM Power E1080 makes the server platform family that is among the most secure even better.

Streamline insights and automation

As more AI models are deployed in production, the challenges around the AI infrastructure are coming to the fore. The typical AI deployment involves sending data from an operational platform to a GPU system. This usually induces latency and may even increase security risks with more data in network. Power10 addresses this challenge with in-core AI inferencing and machine learning. The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) in Power10 core provides the computational strength (at multiple levels of precision) and data bandwidth to tackle demanding AI inferencing and machine learning. Power E1080 delivers 5X faster AI inferencing per socket over Power E9808.

Maximize reliability and availability

Power has been leading the industry in infrastructure reliability with 25% lower downtime vs. comparable high-end server9. With Power E1080 we are making the most reliable server platform in its class8 even better with advanced recovery, diagnostic capabilities, and Open Memory Interface (OMI) attached advance memory DIMMs. The continuous operations of today’s in-memory systems depend on memory reliability because of their large memory footprint. Power10 DIMMs deliver 2X better memory reliability and availability than industry standard DIMMs10.

As enterprises continue to modernize their business, the solutions of our ISV ecosystem partners will take advantage of these innovative and essential capabilities in IBM Power E1080. They will continue to help customers get more from their mission-critical workloads running on Power.

This is a critical time for IT infrastructure. Companies need agility, security, insights and reliability to ensure continuous operations. IBM Power is engineered for times like these.

>> Learn more about IBM Power10 generation of servers.

[1] IBM Power help deliver a frictionless experience in extending mission-critical workloads across hybrid cloud, without requiring additional middleware or application refactoring
[2] IBM Power E1080; two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark running SAP ERP 6.0 EHP5; Power10 3.55-4.0 GHz processor, 4,096 GB memory, 8p/120c/960t, 174,000 SD benchmark users (955,050 SAPS), AIX 7.2, DB2 11.5. Certification # 2021059. All results can be found at sap.com/benchmark Valid as of 8/27/21 HPE Superdome Flex; two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark running SAP ERP 6.0 EHP5; Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L 2.7 GHz, 16p/448c/896t, 152,508 SD benchmark users (877,050 SAPS), running Windows Server 2019 and Microsoft SQL Server 2019, Certification # 2020029
[3] SPECInt Math: (Power10 2170 peak /120 core)/(1620 peak/224 cores)=2.5 Max System SPECint IBM Power E1080 (3.55-4,0 GHz, Power10) 120 Cores, 8 CPUs, SPECint Score 2170, per CPU Score 271.25, per core score 18.08 Date: Audit submitted Hewlett Packard Enterprise Superdome Flex 280 (2.90 GHz, Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H), 224 Cores, 8 CPUs Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H Speed 2900 MHz SPECint Score 1620.00, per CPU Score 202.50 per Core Score 7.23 Date: Feb-2021 Link: CPU2017 Integer Rate Result: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Superdome Flex 280 (2.90 GHz, Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H) (test sponsored by HPE) (spec.org)
[4] Power9 (12c) is 5081 rPerf @ 16,520 Watts (0.31 rPerf/Watt), Power10 (15c) is 7998 rPerf @ 17,320 Watts (0.46 rPerf/Watt). 0.46 / 0.31 = 1.48 More rPerf/Watt
[5] Transparent Memory encryption means that the capability does not need any user configuration
[6] POWER9 core has one AES/SHA crypto engine per 4 threads. Power 10 core has 4 crypto engines per 4 threads
[7] AES-256 in both GCM and XTS modes runs about 2.5 times faster per core when comparing Power E1080 (15-core modules) vs. Power E980 (12-core modules) according to preliminary measurements obtained on RHEL Linux 8.4 and the OpenSSL 1.1.1g library
[8] 5x improvement in per socket inferencing throughput for large size 32b floating point inferencing models from Power9 E980 (12-core modules) to Power10 E1080 (15-core modules ) Based on IBM testing using Pytorch, OpenBLAS on the same BERT Large with SqUAD v1.1 data set
[9] Based on “ITIC 2020 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report”, April 2020
[10] Based on IBM’s internal analysis of the IBM product failure rate of DDIMMS vs Industry Standard-DIMMS
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