Glossary
IBM Power 12 Glossary
Terminology for IBM Power hardware, AI acceleration silicon, and the engineering concepts behind IBM's next Power generation.
A
- AIU (Artificial Intelligence Unit) — IBM Research's family of experimental AI accelerator chips, the upstream research lineage feeding IBM's production AI silicon designs.
- AIX — IBM's UNIX operating system for IBM Power servers, commonly run in its own logical partitions beside IBM i or Linux.
C
- Chiplet Architecture — A processor design approach that splits what was once a single monolithic chip into multiple smaller, interconnected silicon dies (chiplets), often on different manufacturing processes.
- CPW (Commercial Processing Workload) — IBM's proprietary relative performance benchmark for IBM i commercial workloads, used to compare capacity across Power model tiers and generations.
H
I
- IBM i — IBM's integrated operating system for IBM Power servers, descended from OS/400 and commonly still called AS/400 by long-time users.
- IBM i 8.1 (IBM i Next) — The projected next major IBM i operating system release after 7.6, independently projected for 2028 ... the same window analysts expect for Power 12.
- IBM Power — IBM's current enterprise server family for IBM i, AIX, Linux, and hybrid workloads, built around the Power processor architecture.
- iSeries — An older IBM server brand in the AS/400 family history, often used casually to mean a modern IBM i environment.
L
O
- Open Memory Interface (OMI) — IBM's proprietary high-speed serial memory interconnect, replacing direct DDR signaling, already used in Power 10 and Power 11's DDR5 DDIMM memory.
- OpenPOWER Foundation — The IBM-founded (2013), now community-governed foundation that licenses the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) royalty-free to outside implementers.
P
- Power 10 — IBM's prior-generation Power processor family (S1014, S1022, S1022s, S1024, E1050, E1080), launched in 2021, two generations behind the expected Power 12.
- Power 11 — IBM's current, shipping Power processor and server generation, first announced July 2025 and expanded with the entry S1112 in July 2026.
- Power 12 — The unofficial, widely used placeholder name for IBM's Power processor and server generation expected after Power 11. IBM has not confirmed this name, a release date, or any specifications.
- Power 9 — IBM's Power generation before Power 10, still common in AS/400 and IBM i environments that are now comparing Power 11 refresh options.
- Power ISA — The reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture underlying every IBM Power processor generation, developed under OpenPOWER Foundation governance.
R
- RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) — The engineering discipline, central to every IBM Power generation, of designing hardware that minimizes downtime and data loss for mission-critical enterprise workloads.
- rPerf (Relative Performance) — IBM's relative performance metric for AIX and Linux workloads on Power hardware, the AIX/Linux counterpart to the IBM i-focused CPW metric.