IBM announces chip that natively executes Arm and Z instructions concurrently

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…