IBM LinuxOne Emperor 4 is a server that only runs Linux and has 32 CPUs – APK Games

A lot of people use distributions like Ubuntu and SUSE. Maybe it’s your case. But it is in the server segment that the Linux ecosystem stands out. Recent evidence of this comes from the IBM. This week, the company announced the new servers LinuxOne Emperor 4. In addition to the software, they draw attention for having a hardware very powerful.

Humble hardware, just not

This is not a desktop (tower) type of server or one that fits into conventional racks. LinuxOne Emperor 4 is a machine designed to handle workloads equivalent to tens or even hundreds of x86 servers (based on Intel or AMD chips). Therein lies the reason for its generous dimensions.

In fact, we are talking about a system that makes room for a number of components. start with processor. Better said, processors.

The server can be equipped with 32 chips IBM Telum of 16 cores. These units have 7 nanometer manufacturing technology and a frequency of 5.2 GHz, in addition to bringing an accelerator for artificial intelligence tasks.

An IBM LinuxOne Emperor 4 system can also rely on up to 40 TB of RAM memory and 200 configurable IFL-type cores (Integrated Facility for Linux). The latter were specifically developed to process workloads on Linux.

Security has not been overlooked. Just to give you an example, the server has a memory interface that encrypts the data leaving the processors before it is stored in RAM.

IBM LinuxOne Emperor 4 is capable of working with many Linux distributions. These include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and, most notably, Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS.

According to Canonical, Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS has been prepared to handle encryption, artificial intelligence and networking (among others) features offered by the device.

In the wake of compatibility with these distributions comes support for software solutions from various IBM partners such as MongoDB, Nginx, Fujitsu and Illumio.

75% lower energy consumption

Compared to the previous generation, IBM’s new server offers up to 50% more cache, 9% more performance per core, and other improvements.

Thanks to this, in its standard configuration (with 32 processors and 200 IFL cores), LinuxOne Emperor 4 can execute up to 20 billion secure transactions (from banks, for example) per day. In IBM’s words, this capacity equates to about 2,000 x86 cores working together.

That’s a lot of processing power! But the energy consumption must be very high, right? Right. But the server has the reduction of energy consumption as another great attribute.

IBM explains that, again compared to the previous generation, LinuxOne Emperor 4 reduces energy consumption by up to 75% and the carbon footprint by more than 850 tons per year.

Several mechanisms contribute to this. One of them is the possibility that customers have to increase the workload by activating cores that are not used at that time. This action does not increase energy consumption or the emission of greenhouse gases.

To top it off, the energy performance aspect can be managed in real time by the IBM Instana Observability monitoring tool.

Despite all this, it is not possible to guarantee that LinuxOne Emperor 4 will run crisis.