By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 01:27:00
systems
Cunning plan to expand the amount of software that runs on mainframes is also an admission ISVs are focusing their energies elsewhere
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…
