IBM Details 7nm POWER10 CPUs But Not Shipping Until H2'2021

After covering the Linux/open-source POWER10 bring-up for a number of months already, IBM has finally announced firm information on their forthcoming POWER10 processors. POWER10 looks promising but these 7nm CPUs will not begin shipping until the second half of next year.

Among the information published by IBM today pertaining to POWER10 includes:

- POWER10 is to be manufactured on a 7nm process, as expected.

- Up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than POWER9.

- POWER10 features an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator for 10x faster AI inference for FP32, 15x faster AI inference for BFloat16, and 20x faster for INT8 calculations per socket over POWER9.

- Support for multi-petabyte memory clusters.

- Transparent memory encryption and other new hardware security features.

The details revealed today can be found on the IBM Newsroom.

It will be interesting to see how the performance is once they ship towards the end of 2021. We've heard grumblings that POWER10 at the moment doesn't work out for as libre hardware systems as POWER9, but we're waiting to see how that situation plays out closer to the actual launch.