Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in the 1990s were on a more or less annual cadence and technologies were changing fast for both iron and bits. The V3R6 and V3R7 releases spanned the jump from custom CISC processors (we always thought based on a licensed Motorola 68K CPU design) to PowerPC processors in the mid-1990s, and the cadence was kept at around a year for updates to operating systems, databases, and systems software up through OS/400 V5R1, which went on sale with the market-changing dual-core Power4 processor in 2001.

Once V5R2 was in the field in 2002, IBM switched to a two-year cadence on OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i releases, and part of the reason was that server virtualization was sweeping datacenters and an annual cadence coupled with the Dot Com Bust and a recession in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States made everyone want to move more slowly. This is when, we think, people started intentionally skipping releases because even a two-year spacing between releases was too much, and hence IBM announced the Technology Refresh update as a way to bring significant function to current and prior releases so companies could get support for new hardware and also get their hands on new operating system and database features without having to upgrade the core of the operating system. The gap between IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 was only two years and between IBM i 7.1 and IBM i 7.2 was four years, but Big Blue has stopped experimenting with timing and adopted the cadence of the Linux market: Three years between major releases, seven years of support and three years of extended support.

You will have to click on that chart to enlarge it.

Now, everyone knows that IBM keeps at most four releases live and supported in some fashion at any time, and the advent of IBM i 7.6 means that the days of IBM i 7.3 are numbered. Extended extended support (that is not a typo, it really is “extended program support extension”) for IBM i 7.3 will run out on September 30, 2026. So you have a little more than 16 months before we all say “sayonara” to IBM i 7.3 forever.

There is no reason to believe that the just-announced IBM i 7.6, which will ship on April 18, won’t be in the field for a decade with extended extended support, which gets you to 2035. Two more releases after that – what we expect to be called IBM i 8.1 and IBM i 8.2 and which will no doubt be referred to in updated IBM i roadmaps as IBM i Next due in 2028 and IBM i Next+1 in 2031. Heaven willing, there is an IBM i Next+2 in the plan, which we would expect in 2034. And, doing the math, that means this IBM i Next+2 operating system will be in the field until 2044. . . .

Just for fun, as we were contemplating the interplay of Power processors and IBM i operating systems, we put together this hardware support matrix for past, current, and future releases:

On the left side of this table, which you can also enlarge by clicking on it, you see the Power processors over time and the process technology used to create the CPUs used in the systems. To a very large extent, the chip manufacturing process node of the transistors used in each Power CPU determines the features that can be included and the cost of the processors. IBM used to be on the cutting edge on process, but has been hanging back since the 14 nanometer generation used with the Power9 chip. Power11 is not even going to be using 5 nanometer processes at a time when most mainstream Arm and X86 CPUs have or soon will. Some are moving to 3 nanometer processes this year, but IBM did a lot of the retrofitting of the Power architecture with the delayed Power10 design and, given the needs of the IBM i and AIX bases, does not need to push the process envelope to give customers more performance.

We do expect for IBM to make incremental process jumps for Power12 and Power13 processors, but to hang back and use the mature – and therefore relatively cheaper – 5 nanometer and 3 nanometer processes from Samsung and not just down to 1.8 nanometer, 1.4 nanometer, and 1 nanometer processes that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Intel are perfecting now.

A 10-year lifecycle for Power13 machines gets you into 2041 and IBM i Next+2 with extended support (only seven years, bit the full ten that comes with extended extended support) gets you 2031 as well.

It is hard to imagine a roadmap from any system vendor being this predictable looking so far ahead. The only variable is really you, and what you do with your Power Systems and IBM i budgets. As long as you spend, IBM can afford to invest.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search

Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

RELATED STORIES

Share this: