Ah, Power. The architecture that has so much going for it, but despite concerted efforts from very dedicated people, IBM seems to be hellbent on preventing anyone from expanding Power beyond expensive enterprise servers. We had Raptor Computing Systems achieving some niche success with their POWER9 workstations – I have two, and reviewed one of them – but that’s about it. When IBM moved to Power10, the new processors required closed-source, proprietary firmware in a few areas of the design, which made them unsuitable for Raptor to develop a successor to the Talos II and Blackbird POWER9 workstations.
I admire Raptor for sticking firmly to their convictions of only producing fully open source hardware, down to the firmware level.
The requirement for proprietary firmware was never addressed by IBM during the Power10 lifecycle, so Raptor obviously never jumped aboard the IBM Power10 train, and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As such, the only Power10 hardware we have comes from IBM, and the offering consist entirely of enterprise servers, which are unsuitable and unaffordable for home use, whether as server or workstation. Raptor did make a joint announcement with Solid Silicon, with rumours suggesting Solid Silicon was working on a Power10-based chip that didn’t require any proprietary firmware, but that was late 2023, and it’s been silence ever since.
But Power10 is old news now, since IBM just officially launched Power11.
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 128GB of shared L3 (8GB per core) 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 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…
↫ Cameron Kaiser
Sadly, there’s no word on whether or not IBM’s Power11 processors still require proprietary firmware, so it’s impossible to tell if they will show up in any possible Raptor workstations. There’s also zero indication of anyone else joining the fray, and IBM itself obviously isn’t going to focus on end-user workstations because the world is bleak and joyless. That being said, we’ve got some solid rumours from Cameron Kaiser, who is generally well-informed on these topics.
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.
↫ Cameron Kaiser
It’s something, but not much. I would love to be able to upgrade the POWER9 machines in my office to something newer, even if they perform quite well to this day. I simply have a soft spot for Power, and I want the ISA to succeed beyond enterprise servers. The architecture has what it takes to do so, but IBM seems to have zero interest in making it happen, making life quite hard for anyone else in the ecosystem trying their hardest.
All we’re asking for is a single or dual socket Power11 workstation in a nice case, IBM. Just flip one of those servers 90°, disable the enterprise stuff, and optionally ship it with AIX. It won’t bite. I promise.