India team plays key role in making IBM's postage-stamp-sized powerful chip

Power10, a 7-nanometer chip accommodates 18 billion transistors, or about 2.4 transistors per living person on the planet

Tech giant IBM said that a lot of the innovation and technology work for its Power10 processor was done by its team in India. The Big Blue recently revealed the tenth generation of its flagship Power processors. The contributions for the Power10 from IBM's India team range from the physical design of the chip, energy efficiency capabilities to the infusion of artificial intelligence inside the product. 

Power10 is a smaller, faster and more energy-efficient seven-nanometre chip. It is designed to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing. It is half the size of its 14nm Power9 predecessor. It is expected to deliver up to a 3x improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM Power9. The new chip is expected to be available to the businesses globally next year.

The IBM India Systems Development Lab (ISDL) has made significant contributions to processor development and validation and physical design and automation for the Power10, said Rahul Rao, senior technical staff member - enterprise systems development, ISDL, IBM Systems. 

He said the other contributions include performance evaluation and CPU (central processing unit) microarchitecture innovations for the Power10 processor design. These also deal with energy efficiency and workload characterization efforts.

“This 7-nanometer chip is about the size of a postage stamp and accommodates 18 billion transistors, which is equivalent to about 2.4 transistors per living person on the planet,” said Rao.

IBM Power Systems are widely used in sectors such as banking, telecommunication and healthcare industries. They support mission-critical workloads which demand a secure environment to safeguard customer data. 

“IBM Power10, has four times as many encryption engines per core than its predecessor to keep customer data safe in the hybrid cloud environment,” said Akhtar Ali, vice president – India systems development lab and technical computing, IBM Systems.

Ali said that IBM has introduced a breakthrough memory technology in Power10 called ‘memory inception’. This enables higher memory utilisation in cloud environments which will reduce cost.  “With AI improvements to its CPU cores, Power10 delivers up to 20 times better performance for AI inference workloads than its predecessor,” said Ali. “New hardware-enabled security capabilities including transparent memory encryption are designed to support end-to-end security.”

There is also a huge potential for using Power10 in the area of healthcare to fight deadly diseases and find a cure or treatment faster. For instance, Summit, which is one of the world's most powerful supercomputers was built using IBM Power9. The US Department of Energy has allowed the scientific community to conduct breakthrough research on the Covid-19 virus on Summit. 

Using Summit, researchers were able to simulate 8,000 compounds in a matter of days to a model which could impact that infection process by binding to the virus’s spike. They identified 77 small-molecule compounds, such as medications and natural compounds. These have shown the potential to impair Covid-19’s ability to dock with and infect host cells.

Also, cyberattacks are continuing to evolve, IBM said that Power10 offers hardware memory encryption for end-to-end security and faster cryptography. This is applicable for both today's leading encryption standards as well as anticipated future encryption protocols including quantum-safe cryptography.

Power10 was designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents. The company said Samsung Electronics will manufacture the  Power10 processor, combining its semiconductor manufacturing technology along with IBM's CPU designs.