IBM Releases Power9 AI and Machine Learning Chip

February 12, 2018

Make no mistake, the new AI processor from IBM has Watson written all over it—but it does move the software into new territory. We get a glimpse from the brief write-up, “IBM Has a New Chip for AI and Machine Learning” at IT Pro Portal. The new chip, dubbed Power9, is now available through IBM’s cloud portal and through third-party vendors and is built into the new AC9222 platform. (See here for a more detailed discussion of both Power9 and AC9222.) Writer Sead Fadilpaši? quotes market analyst Patrick Moorhead, who states:

Power9 is a chip which has a new systems architecture that is optimized for accelerators used in machine learning. Intel makes Xeon CPUs and Nervana accelerators and NVIDIA makes Tesla accelerators. IBM’s Power9 is literally the Swiss Army knife of ML acceleration as it supports an astronomical amount of IO and bandwidth, 10X of anything that’s out there today.

That is strong praise. Fadilpaši? also quotes IBM’s Brad McCredie, who observes:

Modern workloads are becoming accelerated and the Nvidia GPU is a common accelerator. We have seen this trend coming. We built a deep relationship with them and a partnership between the Power system and the GPU. We have a unique bus that runs between the processor and the GPU and has 10x peak bandwidth over competitive systems.

Will the Power9 live up to its expectations? We suspect IBM has reason to hope for success here.

Cynthia Murrell, February 12, 2018

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