Battle lines are drawn: IBM prepares Power9 to take on Intel and ARM

IBM has many goals with its upcoming Power9 chip, and one of them is to challenge the dominance of Intel's x86 chips in the data center.

The company wants chips based on Power architecture to take a double-digit server chip market share by 2020, Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM, said in an interview.

It'll be a three-way battle between x86, Power and ARM, which has a similar goal of a double-digit market share in the next four years. IBM's Power is off to a better start in terms of socket share, Balog said. IBM already is being used in servers, while ARM server processors are largely still being tested.

Intel dominates the data center server chip market with a 90-plus percent market share. But IDC has predicted that Intel's share will shrink as ARM-based chips and AMD's x86-based Zen take away some of that lead.

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