IBM announces chip that natively executes Arm and Z instructions concurrently

IBM has revealed it is working on a chip with processor cores that can execute instructions for its own mainframe chips and for the Arm architecture – and for the LinuxONE architecture too for good measure.

Big Blue says the unnamed chip will be built on a two-nanometer technology node, include 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, plus AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads.

“Each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently,” the computing veteran promises.

In a blog post, IBM’s Vice President for the zSystems Ecosystem Meredith Stowell pointed out that “The Arm ecosystem includes more than 22 million developers worldwide and supports a rapidly growing portfolio of cloud-native, AI, analytics, infrastructure, and enterprise applications.” IBM’s Z platform is powerful and very well suited to demanding applications.

But while mainframes are a big business for IBM, the overall market is small.

Rocket Software, a vendor that provides mainframe modernization tools, yesterday told The Register that it is aware of 42 IBM mainframe users in Australia – and that the land down under is therefore a market it needs to prioritize.

Commercial application vendors therefore won’t rush to prioritize z/OS and IBM knows it.

Big Blue also knows that major hyperscalers have introduced their own Arm processors and that customers are flocking to them in part because almost all major open source infrastructure, cloud-native, and AI tools run on the architecture.

George Cozma, an analyst at TechInsights, told The Register that while the mainframe market is “small in unit terms” it remains “strategically important.” “Customers do not casually replace these systems because core applications, decades of operational practice, and data gravity make migration expensive and risky,” he wrote.

But while Z is important, the analyst feels it “sits outside the mainstream software targets that define modern cloud and AI infrastructure.” This new chip, Cozma said, represents “ending the platform’s historical isolation from the broader computing mainstream.