Power10 is a superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessor family, based on the open source Power ISA, and announced in August 2020 at the Hot Chips conference; systems with Power10 CPUs.

Power10-based processors will be manufactured by Samsung using a 7 nm process with 18 layers of metal and 18 billion transistors on a 602 mm2 silicon die.

[1][2][3][4] The main features of Power10 are higher performance per watt and better memory and I/O architectures, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Increased clock gating and reworked microarchitecture at every stage, together with the fuse/prefix instructions enabling more work with fewer work units, and smarter cache with lower memory latencies and effective address tagging reducing cache misses, enables the Power10 core to consume half the power as POWER9.

Combined with the improvements in the compute facilities by up to 30% makes the whole processor perform 2.6× better per watt than its predecessor.

And in the case of mounting two cores on the same module, up to 3 times as fast in the same power budget.

Even though the chips are physically identical and the difference is set in firmware, it cannot be changed by the user nor IBM after manufacturing.

A maximum specification configuration allows the Power E1080 to support 192 single slot PCIe cards across a 16 socket system.

The L-models are made for Linux, but are allowed to run AIX and IBM i on up to 25% of available CPU cores.

[10] The change to a 7-nm fabrication process results in significantly higher performance per watt.

Unlike earlier POWER9 and POWER8 CPUs, Power10 requires closed source, third party firmware in security sensitive areas of the CPU module, along with additional closed source, third party firmware in the required off-module memory controller.