Given the rate and pace of AI adoption, the influx of data associated with AI will fuel tremendous business innovations, but requires strategic considerations on where data resides, compute capacity, and necessary security and compliance controls.

This is why understanding the uniqueness of your IT processes, workloads and applications demands a workload placement strategy based on key factors such as the type of data, necessary compute capacity and performance needed and meeting your regulatory security and compliance requirements.

An IBM study, “Build a more intentional hybrid cloud: The key to continuous innovation” reveals that clients who use an intentional hybrid by design approach in configuring their IT infrastructure can deliver up to 3x higher ROI over five years from their digital transformation efforts than those that do not.

Building off a strong year fueled by innovation, IBM® Power® is committed to help clients drive business growth, improve productivity, and remain in compliance with regulatory requirements with the combined power of hybrid cloud and AI. We will continue to:

• Build and deliver differentiated infrastructure as clients need improved levels of resiliency, security, performance, and efficiency for both their current and next generation workloads
• Extend mission critical applications and enable modernization with Red Hat® OpenShift® to increase application velocity and unlock new insights
• Enable thoughtful workload placement with flexible consumption models either on-premises or in the cloud based upon business requirements

In the year ahead, we are excited to preview innovations coming in 2025 to further help accelerate IT transformation needs of our clients with hybrid cloud and AI.

Driving momentum in transforming mission critical workloads

This year we have continued to make improvements to IBM Power Virtual Server offering on IBM Cloud® by enhancing the user experience and expanding the infrastructure itself, so clients can focus more on business outcomes and less on managing IT. This includes ramping up quickly, spending less time maintaining infrastructure, and paying as they go.

Recently, IBM has also extended the capabilities of Power Virtual Server to deploy in a client data center. This delivers the flexibility around consumption and management capabilities of the cloud while keeping the data on-premises to help address regional compliance and governance requirements of the business. 

We have further expanded our portfolio of servers with IBM Power10, increased our footprint to 21 datacenters worldwide and opened a new Center of Excellence to provide additional support for clients onboarding to IBM Power Virtual Server.

Commence your transformation journey with IBM Power Virtual Server

Introducing IBM Power11 processor

With a planned release in 2025, the next generation IBM Power11 system will have innovations in the processor, system, and stack levels to help enterprises propel digital transformation initiatives for their mission-critical infrastructure. IBM Power also continues to support emerging enterprise AI use cases with the MMA (Matrix-Math Assist) architecture.

The Power11 processor is designed to deliver higher clock speeds and can add up to 25% more cores per processor chip than comparable IBM Power10 systems. The Power11 processor builds upon the key capabilities we delivered with Power10 including stronger reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) characteristics, better energy efficiency and energy management, and improved quantum-safe security.

You can read a more detailed technical breakdown of the Power11 processor strategy from Bill Starke, IBM’s lead Power Processor Architect and Distinguished Engineer here.

Integrating IBM Spyre Accelerator and IBM Power

AI workloads are creating their own demands on client’s infrastructure. We are committed to helping clients right size their workload placement and build use cases for even more advanced AI capabilities on IBM Power. I’m excited to reveal that IBM intends to incorporate the IBM Spyre Accelerator in future Power offerings to provide additional AI compute capabilities. Working together, IBM Power11 processors and the IBM Spyre Accelerator are designed to enable the next generation infrastructure to scale demanding AI workloads for businesses.

The IBM Spyre Accelerator is a purpose-built enterprise-grade accelerator offering scalable capabilities for complex AI models and generative AI use cases. The new accelerator features 32 individual accelerator cores onboard, and each Spyre is mounted on a PCIe card.

Jointly designed by IBM Research and IBM Infrastructure, Spyre’s architecture is designed for more efficient AI computation. Notably, the chip will send data directly from one compute engine to the next, leading to an efficient use of energy. This family of processors also uses a range of lower precision numeric formats (such as int4 and int8), to make running an AI model more energy efficient and far less memory intensive.

More details on our plans for the IBM Spyre Accelerator will be revealed in 2025.

Collaborating with the IBM i community to modernize RPG code

We are dedicated to working with our IBM i community in developing a code assistant for IBM i to further help clients maintain and modernize their RPG based core business applications without having to undergo the expense, performance degradation, and risk of refactoring them to Java or other languages. Our goal is to not only increase the productivity of existing RPG developers but more importantly to enable new developers who have little skill with RPG to be able to modernize RPG applications.

Through the RPG code assistant project, the IBM i client community will have the ability to attract new developers and make existing RPG developers more productive with a GenAI based code assistant optimized for RPG, trained with real-world contributions from across the IBM i Community and IBM Development. This allows the IBM i client community to hire developers who do not know RPG, but who can understand the language in its modern form by using modern tools.

In 2025, IBM intends to deliver a code assistant for RPG - a generative AI tool which helps developers of IBM i software understand existing RPG code, create new RPG function using natural language description, and automatically generate test cases for RPG code.

I’m extremely excited for the road ahead. We’ll continue to meet our clients where they are in their IT transformation journey and strive to make the path to success as simple as possible. Reach out to your IBM Power representative or Business Partner to discuss how we can keep making progress together.

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.