IBM Z and LinuxONE Dual-ISA Processor and AI Acceleration at Hot Chips 2026

IBM took the Hot Chips 2026 stage to detail its future IBM Z and LinuxONE processors and the AI inference acceleration chipset that sits beside it. IBM Distinguished Engineer Christian Zoellin is walking through a dual-ISA core that natively runs both z/Architecture and Arm AArch64, and then covered a second-generation on-chip AI accelerator aimed at larger enterprise inference workloads. We previously got to see The IBM z17 Mainframe Brings AI with Telum II and Spyre and The New IBM z17 Telum II Processor Module Cut Open Down to Silicon in cool pieces.

This is being done live from the session, so please excuse typos.

IBM Z and LinuxONE Dual-ISA Processor and AI Acceleration at Hot Chips 2026

IBM opened with the historical context for Z, tracing a lineage that runs from out-of-order execution and 64-bit Linux through pervasive encryption,…