IBM Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Its POWER9 Chip

IBM Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Its POWER9 Chip

After years of being overwhelmingly dominated by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), the market for server processors is becoming a lot more competitive. Advanced Micro Devices unveiled its EPYC server chips earlier this year, and Qualcomm commercially launched its ARM-based Centriq 2400 server processor last month.

International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) is also a player in the server chip market. IBM announced on Tuesday the first systems built around its brand-new POWER9 processor, which is designed to provide Intel-beating performance for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. IBM's base of Power Systems customers will provide a market for these systems, but the real opportunity may be selling POWER9 chips to third parties. Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google is already on board, and two supercomputers being built for the U.S. Department of Energy are powered by IBM's new chips, along with GPUs from NVIDIA.

The POWER9 processor. Image source: IBM.

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Source: Fool.com