With IBM’s recent announcement of the POWER8 processor and architecture, IBM has developed a revolutionary generation of systems focused on the ever-growing big data and cloud needs of the world today. Every day, the world generates 2.5 billion gigabytes of data. Also, 90% of the world’s data was generated within the past 2 years. With this staggering amount of information, it is putting a strain on our infrastructure to process and store this information.  IBM is excited to bring you the new POWER8 series.  Here are 5 things that you should know about this new hardware:

1. IBM POWER8 is the first generation of hardware designed for big data in the cloud. 

With the enormous amount of data being generated every day, IBM has designed a platform that not only can process and store this information, but it was designed specifically to keep up with the ever-growing amount of information being generated on a daily basis

2. POWER8 is 4 times faster than the previous generation

The new POWER8 is built for bigger data in the cloud. It combines the computing power, memory bandwidth and I/O for a faster route to big data reinvention. It leads the market with 4 times the threads per core, and 170% more bandwidth.  What does this all mean? It means get insights up to 50 times faster with systems designed for big data.

3. POWER8 is the first Linux-based ecosystem

Big data solutions built on the IBM PowerLinux platform are architected to harness the data explosion facing your business.  With the launch of IBM PowerLinux big data solutions, we took a leadership role in offering optimized solutions ready for immediate deployment, built on IBM InfoSphere software like BigInsights and Streams. We’ve also taken our role in the open source community very seriously, with heavy contributions to projects like Apache Hadoop enabling continuous development in the fields of analytics and high performance computing.

4. Superior cloud economics

Power Systems 1 and 2 socket servers provide the ideal foundation for Linux-based scale-out data and cloud environments, providing the performance-for-price advantages and security to confidently move more data-centric applications to the cloud.

5. CAPI Port and NVIDIA partnership

The industry-first, Coherent Attached Processor Interface port allows for accelerators, GPUs, flash memory, networking, FPGAs to connect directly to process sharing same address space to increase performance, decrease latency for more workload for your dollar.

Also an industry-first, IBM has partnered with NVIDIA to add Java acceleration on the GPU, an industry first that allows speed up for java code. 8 x improvement. Something not seen in previous hardware.

Learn more about the new POWER8 with IBM Redbooks here.

 - James Pistilli