IBM’s POWER9 – Built for AI and Machine Learning

In a world that requires increasing amounts of compute power to handle the resource-intensive demands of workloads like artificial intelligence and machine learning, IBM enters the fray with its latest generation Power chip – POWER9.

The Power chip uses some of the latest technologies, resulting in two significant advantages: one, increased bandwidth, and two, ability for main processors and accelerators to work coherently and simultaneously on data.

The company intends to sell the chips to third-party manufacturers and to cloud vendors including Google. Meanwhile, it’s releasing a new computer powered by the POWER9 chip, the AC922 and it intends to offer the chips in a service on the IBM cloud. “We generally take our technology to market as a complete solution,” Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of cognitive systems explained. Mr. McCredie was quoted on TechCrunch.

Stating that it is a one of its kind in the industry, Dipankar Sarma, distinguished engineer, Linux Technology Center, IBM Systems, said the new chip doubles the bandwidth by which one can get more data really fast. “We significantly increase the ability to process data; five to 10 times faster,” he said. Mr. Sarma was quoted on The Hindu.

He spoke of two applications. One in retail, where customers can take a photo of a dress they like and search online for the retailer who offers it. Another application is the detection of fraudulent use of credit card.

Chirag Dekate, who is research director for HPC, machine learning and emerging technologies at Gartner says this release is a continuation of IBM’s aggressive approach to capture high-growth market segments like artificial intelligence. “By aligning their strategy across segments like AI (specifically machine learning and deep learning), it enables IBM to better compete in hyperscale datacenter and broader market datacenter initiatives. This has a potential to drive direct revenue impact for IBM and enable new larger scale datacenter deployments,” Dekate explained. Mr. Dekate was quoted on TechCrunch.

POWER9 will be commercially available by the end of this month.