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While Power11 doesn't appear to offer any more cores per socket than Power10, Big Blue says those cores are substantially more efficient. With the new chips, IBM is introducing the concept of resource groups, a firmware feature that aims to maximize utilization and increase performance without driving up energy consumption. The chips also feature an energy-saving mode that trades a little bit of performance for a 28 percent improvement in efficiency.
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.]
POWER9 clients upgrading to Power11 can reduce energy consumption by up to 60% for the same performance. Power11 outperforms x86 systems, providing twice the performance per watt. Compared to Power10, Power11 offers up to 33% better performance per watt, with the S1022 showing the largest gain.
Energy Efficient ModePower11 has introduced a new Energy Efficient mode that, when enabled, can reduce energy consumption by up to 30%, with only an approximate 10% reduction in performance. This impact will vary depending on the system and configuration. The power mode can be dynamically established through the HMC GUI, as illustrated in Figure 1-8.
New P11 Processor DetailsHere are some details on the new Power11 processor design:Technology and Packaging:– 602mm2 7nm Samsung (18B Devices)– 18-layer metal stack, enhanced device– Single-chip or Dual-chip socketsComputational Capabilities:– Up to 16 SMT8 Cores (2 MB L2 Cache / core)– Up to 128 MB L3 cache (low latency non-uniform cache architecture management)– Enterprise performance focus:• 3x core performance relative to POWER9• 2x thread strength relative to POWER9• 4x L2 cache, 4xMMU/ core relative to POWER9• 4x crypto engine / core relative to POWER9– AI computational Focus:• 2x general SIMD / core relative to POWER9• 4x matrix SIMD / core relative to POWER9• New AI Instructions and data typesRobust Data Plane:– 2 TB/s raw (32GT/s) PowerAXON + OMI signaling– SMP interconnect for up to 16 sockets– 2x2 OMI memory bandwidth relative to POWER9– 64 TB OMI DDR large system memory capacity– x64 PCIe Gen5 / DCM:2xbandwidth relative to POWER9
