IBM POWER8 Technology

Special Issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development

Over the years, IBM Power^® systems have played key roles for both commercial enterprise computing and high-performance computing. Our latest special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development emphasizes new hardware and software approaches that are foundational for the IBM POWER8 technology. This technology provides a data-optimized design that is well-suited for analytics and other Big Data problems of today, as well as cloud-based workloads across multiple environments.

As noted in the Preface for this issue, generation after generation of Power processors have introduced advanced and highly effective techniques, such as large-scale non-directory-based symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), flexible and dynamic partitioning of resources among operating systems executing in the same SMP, simultaneous multithreading (SMT) multiprocessor chips, and high-frequency processor design.

The POWER8 technology is the successor to POWER/POWER7+ technology, with a focus on improved thread and core performance, SMT, reliability, larger caches, transactional memory, field-programmable gate array support, vector processing, accelerators, increased parallelism through additional cores, and much more.

Clifford A. Pickover

Editor-in-Chief

IBM Journal of Research and Development