Marking the first processor milestone from its collaboration with Arm, IBM has announced the first dual-architecture mainframe processor – designed to enable enterprises to run operating systems and applications on both the IBM and Arm compute platforms in future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems.
The new processor is being developed to allow organisations to run Arm-native Linux environments simultaneously with z/OS and Linux on IBM Z, while benefiting from IBM’s established security, reliability, and scale.
With more than 22-million developers worldwide, the Arm software ecosystem supports a broad and growing range of applications from cloud to edge including the cloud-native and AI software increasingly shaping modern infrastructure. This new processor will bring that ecosystem to the IBM platforms known globally for transaction processing and data-intensive operations. Arm workloads will benefit from IBM’s enterprise-grade capabilities, including enhanced reliability, hardware-level fault detection and recovery, advanced encryption, secure key management, and AI acceleration.
Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor’s design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, 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.
The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z – or Arm and LinuxONE – instructions concurrently while prioritising the platform’s established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory.
“As organisations modernise their application portfolios and integrate AI into core business operations, they need infrastructure that expands their options,” says Christian Jacobi, CTO and IBM Fellow at IBM Systems Development. “This processor represents a significant architectural advancement for IBM Z and LinuxONE. By bringing Arm natively to our platform, we’re combining access to one of the industry’s fastest-growing software ecosystems with the qualities that have made IBM systems the foundation for how businesses run today.”
Mohamed Awad, executive vice-president of Cloud AI at Arm, adds: “As AI scales, more of the computing landscape is converging on Arm. IBM Z and LinuxONE power some of the world’s most demanding workloads in highly regulated industries. Bringing Arm compute and its software ecosystem to these platforms will extend that momentum into mission-critical enterprise infrastructure to give organisations greater choice in how they deploy AI.”