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POWER9 µarch
General Info
Arch Type	CPU
Designer	IBM
Manufacturer	GlobalFoundries
Introduction	August, 2017
Phase-out	August, 2018
Process	14 nm
Core Configs	24
Pipeline
Type	Superscalar
Speculative	Yes
Reg Renaming	Yes
Stages	12-16
Instructions
ISA	Power ISA v3.0
Cache
L1I Cache	32 KiB/core
L1D Cache	32 KiB/core
L2 Cache	512 KiB/core
L3 Cache	120 MiB/chip
Succession
POWER8 POWER10

POWER9 is IBM's successor to POWER8, a 14 nm microarchitecture for Power-based server microprocessors that is set to be introduced in the 2nd half of 2017. POWER9-based processors are branded under the POWER9 family.

Process Technology

POWER9 is set to be fabricated on GlobalFoundries' 14 nm FinFET process, the same process that's used by AMD for their Zen microarchitecture.

Compatibility

Initial support for POWER9 started with Linux Kernel 4.8.

Vendor	OS	Version	Notes
IBM	AIX	7.?	Support
	IBM i	?	Support
Linux	Linux	Kernel 4.8	Initial Support
Wind River	VxWorks	VxWorks 7.?	Support

Compiler support

Compiler	CPU	Arch-Favorable
GCC	-mcpu=pwr9	-mtune=pwr9
LLVM	-mcpu=pwr9	-mtune=pwr9
XL C/C++	-mcpu=pwr9	-mtune=pwr9

Variations

IBM offers POWER9 in two flavors: Scale-Out (SO) and Scale-Up (SU). The Scale-Out variations are design for traditional datacenter clusters utilizing single- and -dual sockets setups. The Scale-Up variations are designed for NUMA servers with four sockets and up, supporting large memory and throughput.

For both the Scale-Out and the Scale-Up there are two variations, a 12-core SMT8 model and a 24-core SMT4 model. The SMT4 is optimized for Linux Ecosystem whereas the SMT8 is said to be optimized for the PowerVM Ecosystem community (AIX / IBM i customers). Those models support up to 8 channels of DDR4 memory for up to 128 GiB of memory.

	Linux Ecosystem	PowerVM Ecosystem
	24-core / 96 Threads	12-core / 96 Threads
Scale-Out (SO)
Scale-Up (SU)

Architecture

Key changes from POWER8

• 14 nm process (from 22 nm)
  • 17-layer metal stack
  • 8,000,000,000 transistors
• Support for Power ISA v3.0
• Higher single-thread performance
• New highly modular architecture
• Shorter pipeline
  • 5 stages eliminated from fetch to compute vs POWER8
  • Roughly 5 stages were also eliminated for fixed-point operations
  • Up to 8 cycles were eliminated for floating-point operations
• Improved branch prediction
• Cache
  • 120 MiB NUCA L3
    • eDRAM
    • 7 TB/s on-chip bandwidth
• Hardware Acceleration
  • Enhanced on-chip acceleration
  • Nvidia NVLINK 2.0
  • CAPI 2.0
• I/O Subsystem
  • PCIe Gen4
  • Local SMP - 16 GT/s per lane interface
  • Remote SMP - 25 GT/s per lane interface
    • 48-96 lanes capability
    • IBM's SMP connect for their scale-up systems
    • Also available for the accelerators
• Virtualization
  • QoS assistance
  • New Interrupt architecture
  • Workload-optimized frequency
  • Hardware enforced trusted execution

Execution Slice Microarchitecture

Execution Slice Microarchitecture is POWER9's entirely new refactored core modular design. The same modules were used to build both the SMT4 and SMT8 cores (and in theory scale further to higher thread count although that's not going to happen in this iteration). These modules allow IBM to address the various processor models with support for the different configurations such as bandwidth/lines (from 128 to 64 byte sectors).

A Slice is the basic 64-bit computing block incorporating a single Vector and Scalar Unit (VSU) coupled with Load/Store Unit (LSU). VSU has a heterogeneous mix of computing capabilities including integer and floating point supporting scalar and vector operations. IBM claims this setup allows for higher utilization of resources while providing efficient exchanges of data between the individual slices. Two slices coupled together make up the Super-Slice, a 128-bit POWER9 physical design building block. Two super-slices together along with an Instruction Fetch Unit (IFU) and an Instruction Sequencing Unit (ISU) form a single POWER9 SMT4 core. The SMT8 variant is effectively two SMT4 units.

POWER8	P9 SMT8 (4x Super-Slice)	P9 SMT4 (2x Super-Slice)	Super-Slice	Slice

Pipeline

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Die Shot

Tetracosa-Core

• GlobalFoundries 14 nm FinFET Process
• 17-layer metal stack
• 8,000,000,000 transistors

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See also

• Intel's Skylake & Kaby Lake
• AMD's Zen
• Qualcomm's Falkor