SAN FRANCISCO, July 8 (Reuters) - International Business

Machines ( IBM ) on Tuesday announced a new line of data center

chips and servers that it says will be more power-efficient than

rivals and will simplify the process of rolling out artificial

intelligence in business operations.

IBM ( IBM ) introduced its new Power11 chips on Tuesday, marking its

first major update to its "Power" line of chips since 2020.

These chips have traditionally vied against offerings from

Intel ( INTC ) and Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ) in data

centers, particularly in specialized sectors such as financial

services, manufacturing and healthcare.

Like Nvidia's ( NVDA ) AI servers, IBM's ( IBM ) Power systems are an

integrated package of chips and software.

Tom McPherson, general manager of Power systems at IBM ( IBM ), said

the Armonk, New York-based company used that tight coupling to

focus on reliability and security.

The Power11 systems, available from July 25, will not need

any planned downtime for software updates, and their unplanned

downtime each year averages just over 30 seconds.

They are also designed to detect and respond within a minute

to a ransomware attack - where hackers encrypt data and then try

to extract a ransom in exchange for the keys, IBM ( IBM ) said.

In the fourth quarter of this year, IBM ( IBM ) plans to integrate

Power11 with Spyre, its AI chip introduced last year.

McPherson said IBM ( IBM ) does not aim to compete with Nvidia ( NVDA ) in

helping create and train AI systems, but is instead focused on

simplifying AI deployment for inference, the process of putting

an AI system to work in speeding up a business task.

"We can integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into this for

inference acceleration and help their business process

improvements," McPherson said in an interview last week

referring to work with early customers.

"It's not going to have all the horsepower for training or

anything, but it's going to have really good inferencing

capabilities that are simple to integrate."