IBM announced a Power 8 iron for the P05 Software tier.

The Power 8 systems announced in early may had only machines with Software tier P10 and P20, but not with the entry software tier P05. The P05 software tier is priced very attractive and so this is the natural choice for many smaller IBM i customers. So i had asked Steve Will on Twitter whether there will be no P05 with Power 8 and he told me that the P05 machine will come later this year.

With the June announcement IBM has now officially announced this 4 core P05 machine.

4-Core Processor Feature

For clients that need fewer than six or eight processor cores in the single-socket
IBM Power System S814 server, a new 4-Core 3.02 GHz POWER8 Processor Card
(#EPXK) is available. There is no upgrade to increase the cores on this feature. This
server supports AIX, IBM i, and Linux, but is especially attractive to IBM i clients
with its P05 software tier. It is designed to meet many entry client requirements with
its 64 GB memory maximum, eight SAS drives in its system unit maximum, and
seven PCIe slots maximum. The IBM i Solution Edition (#4928) and Capacity Backup
option for IBM i (#0444) are supported.

This machine equipped with 4 activated cores,  4 387 GB SAS SSD drives, 4 big slow drives for cold data and 64 GB main storage is an absolute price/performance winner. We have a similar config at our site with 200 heavy ERP User and response times under 0.1 sec.