Glossary

IBM Power7 Glossary

IBM Power7, IBM i, and Power hardware end-of-support, valuation, and migration terminology, defined in plain English.

C

• CPW (Commercial Processing Workload) — IBM's relative performance metric for sizing IBM i systems, used to compare capacity across processor features and generations.

D

• Digital Karma Federation — The machine-readable discovery protocol this site and its sibling AS400System.com properties publish under, enabling AI systems to reliably parse structured site data.

E

• EOS (End of Service) — The date IBM stops providing standard hardware maintenance, machine code updates, and parts commitments for a specific model.
• EOSL (End of Service Life) — Often used interchangeably with EOS, though some vendors distinguish EOSL as the final point after which even third-party or extended support is not commercially viable.

H

• HMC (Hardware Management Console) — The appliance or virtual appliance used to manage LPARs, firmware, and virtualization on IBM Power hardware.

I

• IBM Power Virtual Server — IBM's Power-as-a-cloud-service offering, letting IBM i, AIX, or Linux workloads run on IBM Cloud-hosted Power infrastructure instead of owned hardware.

P

• Power10 — IBM's 2021-generation Power processor and server family, actively sold and supported alongside Power11.
• Power11 — IBM's current shipping Power processor and server generation, announced July 2025.
• Power7 — IBM's 2010-generation Power processor and server family, spanning the entry 710 Express through the flagship 795, now the oldest generation covered anywhere in the AS400System.com portfolio.
• Power8 — IBM's 2014-generation Power processor and server family, the direct successor to Power7 and the first step in the Power7 modernization chain.
• Power9 — IBM's 2017-generation Power processor and server family, a common used-market migration target off Power7.
• PowerVM — IBM's virtualization platform for Power servers, providing LPAR partitioning and the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).

R

• rPerf (Relative Performance) — IBM's broader relative-performance metric, used across AIX and general Power sizing, distinct from the IBM i-specific CPW metric.

S

• Software Tier — IBM i's processor-based software pricing tier (P05 through P80), which determines license and subscription pricing independent of the physical hardware generation.

T

• TPM (Third-Party Maintenance) — Hardware maintenance provided by a vendor other than IBM, typically after IBM's own end-of-service date, at 50-70% below OEM pricing.
• TurboCore — A Power7/Power7+ operating mode, notably on the Power 780, that deactivates some processor cores in exchange for a higher clock speed on the remaining cores.