InterSystems IRIS Minimum Supported CPU Models

When AMD published the x86-64 standard in 1999, little did they know they were inventing what would become the de-facto architecture for server CPUs.  But the CPUs of today aren’t the same as ones produced 20 years back – as they have extensions for everything from Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) to Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VT-d).

InterSystems would like to take better advantage of these new extensions in upcoming versions of InterSystems IRIS.  While our compilers are smart enough to create optimized code for many situations, some optimizations can only be turned on by explicitly cutting off support for processors that do not have that instruction set. Additionally, we are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain older CPU models to test on.

Starting with IRIS 2024.1, InterSystems is planning to start requiring a minimum CPU microarchitecture for all Intel- & AMD-based servers.  This applies across all x86-64 Operating Systems, including Windows, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Oracle Linux, and MacOS.  The following table lists the CPU microarchitectures that will be supported.

If you bought a new machine in the last 6 years or so, it’s likely that your processor is included in the above.  Please take a few minutes to verify that your servers will meet these new criteria and let me know if this policy will have material impact on your business.  The article linked below shows how you can do this.

Support for other CPU architectures remains unchanged.

• IBM POWER 8 and higher CPUs for AIX-based workloads.
• ARM64v8 and higher are supported for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu workloads.

Customers running in AWS, Azure, or GCP can rest assured that current models available are supported.

In the future, we plan to review this list on an annual basis.