IBM Power System E980: Technical Overview and Introduction

This IBM® Redpaper™ publication provides a broad understanding of a new architecture of the IBM Power System E980 (9080-M9S) server that supports IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux operating systems (OSes). The objective of this paper is to introduce the major innovative Power E980 offerings and relevant functions:

The IBM POWER9™ processor, which is available at frequencies of 3.55 - 4.0 GHz.
Significantly strengthened cores and larger caches.
Supports up to 64 TB memory.
Integrated I/O subsystem and hot-pluggable Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Gen4 slots, double the bandwidth of Gen3 I/O slots.
Supports EXP12SX and ESP24SX external disk drawers, which have 12 Gb SAS interfaces and double the existing EXP24S drawer bandwidth.
New IBM EnergyScale™ technology offers new variable processor frequency modes that provide a significant performance boost beyond the static nominal frequency.

This publication is for professionals who want to acquire a better understanding of IBM Power Systems™ products. The intended audience includes the following roles:

Clients
Sales and marketing professionals
Technical support professionals
IBM Business Partners
Independent software vendors (ISVs)

This paper expands the current set of IBM Power Systems documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of the Power E980 server.
This paper does not replace the current marketing materials and configuration tools. It is intended as an extra source of information that, together with existing sources, can be used to enhance your knowledge of IBM server solutions.