Power11 hits the market this month

IBM made the date official: Power11 launches July 25, with the 32 AI-core Spyre Accelerator expected to follow in the fourth quarter. IBM's launch products will be the full-rack Power E1180 with up to up to 256 SMT-8 Power11 cores with 2MB L2 each and up to 128GBMB of shared L3 (8GBMB per core with the correct figures in the Red Book) with 64TB of DDR5 memory, the midrange 4U Power E1150 with up to 120 Power11 cores and 16TB of DDR5, the junior 4U Power S1124 with up to 60 Power11 cores with 8MB of L3 per core and 8TB of DDR5, and the "low-end" 2U Power S1122 with up to 60 Power11 cores and 4TB of DDR5. The processors come in 16, 24 or 30-core versions; the E systems have four sockets (with up to four nodes in the E1180) and the S systems have two. All four systems can run AIX and Linux, and all systems except for the E1150 can run IBM i. As is usual for IBM's initial offerings, internally they look like straight-up implementations of the Blueridge reference platform and should be expected to scale accordingly. And if you have to ask how much they are, well ...

It's notable that the "meet the family" document IBM links from the press release — so we can assume it's officially blessed — says nothing about OMI, only DDR5 RAM. However, IBM has made it clear that Power11 will continue to have OMI, since enterprise Power10 customers would certainly have had an investment in it, and the upper tier datasheets reference OMI channel capacity. We don't know if the OMI firmware for Power11 is open and libre (it was not in Power10), nor if the Synopsys IP blocks reportedly used in Power10's I/O are still present, because IBM didn't say, or if the "low-end" binned CPUs are different in this regard.

If there are going to be third-party Power11 systems, and IBM didn't say anything in the press release about them either, they generally follow six to twelve months after. We have heard little from Raptor since about the SolidSilicon S1 and X1, and because all indications suggest the S1 is a Power10 implementation without the crap, this already puts them behind the curve. That said, adapting Power11 should be possible to any next-generation Power ISA workstation: the Talos II and T2 Lite are fairly straightforward reworks of the reference POWER9 Romulus design, and Blackbird is still Romulus, just in a much smaller form factor. These first-generation P11 boxes, as presumably performant as they are, wouldn't be nice to have in an office and IBM just doesn't do end user sales. Creating a T3 based on Blueridge would seem to be the best way forward for Raptor to regain the top slot in OpenPOWER workstations — assuming the architecture is still open.

[UPDATE: I have been advised by an anonymous individual with knowledge of the situation that a new Raptor announcement on products under development is scheduled for Q1 2026 ... which would be "six to twelve months after" as predicted. "Open firmware" is specifically mentioned and absolutely planned. It's worth pointing out that both Raptor and SolidSilicon are now listed as top-tier Platinum members for OpenPOWER parallel with IBM itself. That implies SolidSilicon is still in the mix and IBM is still backing OpenPOWER. They stressed this is not an official announcement, so you take it for what it's worth.]