IBM Unveils Dual-Architecture Chip Running Arm and Z Instructions at 5.7 GHz on 2nm Process

IBM's first dual-ISA core natively executes ARM and z/Architecture in the same core; all cores run at 5.7 GHz base frequency -- next-gen mainframe AI processor is built on 2nm node with 11 cores

IBM's next-gen AI processor is the first time it has supported dual ISA execution natively within the same core. Born out of a collaboration between IBM and Arm that was announced in April, the chip is designed to bring the software support available across the Arm ecosystem to IBM's mainframes, allowing businesses to unify deployment rather than relying on separate Arm/x86 servers and z/Architecture mainframes for different purposes. The approach here isn't a heterogeneous CPU with separate Arm cores packaged on the same chip; IBM has built a core that can execute either z/Architecture or AArch64 instructions, and can switch between them dynamically "within nanoseconds," according to the company. During the Hot Chips 2026 reveal, IBM says it believes this is the first processor to treat both ISAs as "first-class citizens." IBM relies on Linux Kernel-level Virtual Machine (KVM) to support AArch64 instructions, the same mechanism that allows IBM to support Linux on Z mainframes. Standard z/Architecture instructions bypass KVM. The idea is to ensure that mainframe reliability isn't sacrificed for broader software support, with IBM claiming 99.999999% uptime, even further than traditional high-availability claims. IBM says that equates to just 0.032 seconds of downtime per year. Much of the development in the software world, particularly around AI, happens with x86 and/or Arm targets in mind, leaving the mainframe behind to figure out its own solution. IBM could, and has, worked to port this software to s390x, but that's not a long-term solution. "We would never be able to work with all of them," Tina Tarquinio, chief product officer at IBM for IBM Z and LinuxONE, told VentureBeat. IBM's dual-ISA core can execute Arm software without modifications, according to the company, allowing Arm-based virtual machines to run as if they were operating on native-Arm silicon. And that's because, well, they are operating on native-Arm silicon, just in a different way. A high-level look at IBM's dual-ISA processor and next-gen Spyre accelerator The processor that presumably will live in z18 mainframes comes with 11 high-performance cores, built on a 2nm process, that can operate at a base frequency of 5.7 GHz. Even on those specs, and ignoring dual-ISA execution, it's a considerable step up over the current Telum II processor that IBM introduced in 2024. That chip features eight cores operating at up to 5.5 GHz. Otherwise, IBM's dual-ISA processor comes with the same 36 MB of private L2, as well as virtual L3 and L4. These caches are larger than Telum II at 432 MB of virtual L3 and 3.5 GB of virtual L4. Also carried forward is an on-chip DPU, as well as hardware accelerators for AI, compression, and cryptography workloads, same as Telum II. Outside of more cores and higher clocks, much of the work on IBM's dual-ISA processor happened, naturally, in the core itself, which we'll dig into in the next section. The core supports simultaneous multithreading, which is available to both ISAs. Alongside the processor, IBM teased its next-gen AI accelerator at Hot Chips 2026. It's considerably more capable than the current Spyre accelerator, which makes sense, given IBM's new capabilities with Arm. The new accelerator comes with 16 cores that include optimizations for newer AI data formats, including FP4/MXFP4. The big change comes in memory, however, with IBM moving off LPDDR5 to lower-capacity but significantly higher-bandwidth HBM3e. Each accelerator comes with 96 GB of HBM3e, offering up to 4TB/s, 20x that of what IBM is able to deliver with LPDDR5. IBM core changes to support z/Architecture and ARM Much of the work on IBM's next-gen processor happened in the core itself in order to support native execution of AArch64 instructions. The chip has a full hardware implementation of AArch64 v9.3 with Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) support, supporting 2,792 AArch64 instructions. IBM says the goal was to leverage Starting at the top of the core, the branch prediction area uses the existing Telum II design without any changes. In the fetch engine, IBM leverages virtual cache tags to fetch data quickly with cache to avoid translation overhead. IBM built automation tools to consume the ARM XML and understand how to move instructions through the core. IBM says this is the biggest area of silicon expansion in the core in order to support decoding AArch64 instructions. In dispatch, IBM repurposed general purpose register rename in banked general registers 16 through 31. In the arithmetic and load/store units, much of the major data flow is shared; addition is addition, as IBM put it. However, IBM implemented new hardware structures for SVE and special data types like FP16. IBM also says there was some non-obvious reuse of its existing CISC, such as memory copy and clear. The X-Late, or translation, engine reuses the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) but leverages a new page walk. As opposed to a heterogeneous chip, which accomplishes mixing ISAs on the same die by leveraging different cores, IBM says the driving force behind a dual-ISA core was to deliver the scale of Arm software on a mission-critical platform. Mainframes are still the bedrock of vital data movement in financial institutions, governments, and more. IBM generally ships new mainframes every two and a half to three years, with z17 mainframes revealed in 2024 at Hot Chips. We expect this mainframe to follow a similar timeline. As usual with deep mainframe infrastructure, however, the actual rollout largely depends on the institution's individual needs. Full IBM Hot Chips 2026 presentation

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. While IBM Z's core strengths - reliability, security, and virtualization - remain the gold standard for mission-critical operations, they are tethered to an architecture that has increasingly diverged from the modern software development lifecycle." IBM is therefore trying to get the best of all possible worlds: continuity for the small group of ISVs that currently make mainframe products and their customers, expanded software choice for existing IBM customers that also makes Z a more interesting choice for the mainframe-curious, and the nine-nines resilience of the mainframe for more workloads. IBM suggested the new chip will arrive in 2028. Big Blue released its most recent generation of mainframes, the z17, in 2025, and typically delivers new models every three years. The chip therefore looks a good candidate to power z18 machines. One last thing: Cozma pointed out that IBM has form developing dual-architecture chips. "Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot," he wrote. "The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly." ®

IBM is building a dual-architecture mainframe chip that will run Arm and Z software on the same cores

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. First look: IBM is developing a mainframe chip designed to run Arm software directly alongside IBM Z and LinuxONE code. The approach could let customers add Linux, cloud and AI applications while keeping core transaction workloads on the same system. The processor was showcased at Hot Chips 2026 and is expected to use 11 IBM Z cores built on a 2-nanometer process. IBM said the cores will operate above 5.7 GHz and support native execution of both z/Architecture and AArch64 instructions. That's the central change here: IBM isn't placing separate Arm and Z cores on the same chip, and it isn't using emulation. Instead, Arm instruction support is being built directly into the mainframe core, with each processor core able to run Arm instructions concurrently with IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions. The design could make it easier for customers to run Arm-based Linux, cloud-native and AI software alongside mainframe applications that handle core transaction and database workloads. IBM said it wants to combine the reach of the Arm software ecosystem with the scalability, security and high-availability features associated with Z and LinuxONE. The chip will also include a set of specialized accelerators. IBM plans AI inference hardware for in-transaction fraud detection, a data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and separate accelerators for compression, cryptography and sorting. Its cache system is substantial: IBM disclosed a 36 MB private L2 cache, a 432 MB virtual L3 cache and as much as 3.5 GB of virtual L4 cache, resources intended to keep latency low for large databases and transaction-heavy workloads. A CAD layout of IBM's dual-architecture processor chip. IBM hasn't named the processor or announced the system that will use it, but the company said it expects the design to arrive in 2028. IBM launched its current z17 mainframe generation in 2025 and has generally updated the platform on a three-year schedule, making the chip a likely candidate for a future z18 family. The announcement comes as Arm gains a larger role in enterprise infrastructure. Major cloud providers have introduced their own Arm processors, while open-source infrastructure, AI and cloud-native software increasingly supports the architecture. According to Meredith Stowell, IBM's vice president for the zSystems Ecosystem, the Arm ecosystem includes more than 22 million developers and a growing selection of cloud-native, AI, analytics, infrastructure and enterprise software. IBM's mainframes remain central to many large organizations, particularly in financial services. IBM says its Z and LinuxONE systems run 68% of the world's production IT workloads, while 77 of the world's 100 largest banks use the platforms. Still, the mainframe market is limited compared with the broader server market. That can make IBM Z a lower priority for independent software vendors, even as the systems continue to run some of the most critical workloads inside major companies. George Cozma, an analyst at TechInsights, told The Register that the market is "small in unit terms" but "strategically important." He said customers rarely replace mainframes because "core applications, decades of operational practice, and data gravity make migration expensive and risky." Cozma said the dual-architecture processor could help close the distance between IBM Z and the software environment driving modern cloud and AI deployments. The technology would let IBM retain the features that have long defined its mainframes while expanding the software available to customers. IBM Z systems already run Linux workloads beside z/OS applications through KVM and OpenShift virtualization. The new processor would expand that model by supporting both s390x/Z and Arm64 virtual machines. IBM hasn't announced plans to support operating systems beyond those discussed at Hot Chips. But by adding Arm execution directly to the processor, the company is trying to make its next mainframe generation more useful for organizations that need both legacy-scale transaction processing and newer Linux and AI workloads.

IBM unveils 2nm processor built for dual-architecture computing

IBM has unveiled a 2-nanometer processor designed to bring Arm computing directly into its mainframe systems, allowing enterprises to run Arm-native Linux alongside existing IBM workloads. Announced at the Hot Chips conference, the processor is the first dual-architecture mainframe chip from IBM and is being developed for future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. It is the first hardware milestone from IBM's collaboration with Arm, established in April. The chip is designed to let organizations run Arm applications without moving those workloads to separate servers. At the same time, existing z/OS and Linux applications can continue running on the same enterprise infrastructure. That could give IBM customers access to software developed for the Arm ecosystem while retaining the security, reliability and availability features associated with IBM's mainframe platforms. The Arm ecosystem now includes more than 22 million developers worldwide. The processor uses a 2-nanometer manufacturing process and contains 11 high-performance cores capable of operating above 5.7 GHz. It also includes AI inference accelerators aimed at workloads such as in-transaction fraud detection. A key part of the design is that IBM did not build separate Arm and IBM cores. Instead, each core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions. This allows the two software environments to operate within the same processor architecture. The chip also includes a dedicated on-chip data processing unit designed to accelerate I/O operations, along with a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. IBM says its Z and LinuxONE platforms can scale to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. That gives the new processor a path into systems handling large transaction-processing and data-intensive workloads. "As organizations modernize their application portfolios and integrate AI into core business operations, they need infrastructure that expands their options," said Christian Jacobi, Chief Technology Officer and IBM Fellow, 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." Arm processors have become widely used across cloud infrastructure, mobile devices and increasingly AI computing. IBM's move brings that software compatibility into a class of systems traditionally built around its own processor architecture. For enterprises, the change could make it easier to adopt Arm-based applications while keeping workloads inside infrastructure designed for high availability and security. IBM also says Arm workloads will have access to hardware-level fault detection and recovery, encryption, secure key management and AI acceleration. "As AI scales, more of the computing landscape is converging on Arm," said Mohamed Awad, Executive Vice President, Cloud AI, 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 organizations greater choice in how they deploy AI." The processor is still under development, and IBM has not announced when systems using it will become commercially available. The company said the design marks a step toward giving enterprises more flexibility in where they run newer Arm-based software.

IBM's next-gen mainframe chip is the first to run Arm and Z workloads on the same cores

IBM is announcing today at the annual Hot Chips conference what may be the most consequential change to mainframe architecture in decades: a processor whose cores can natively execute both IBM's own instruction set and Arm's -- switching between the two in nanoseconds. The chip, which will power the next generation of IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, is the first dual-architecture mainframe processor ever built. It is designed to let enterprises run the vast and fast-growing ecosystem of Arm-native Linux software -- including the AI frameworks that increasingly define modern infrastructure -- directly alongside the z/OS transaction-processing workloads that anchor the world's banks, insurers, and governments. "As technology enthusiasts on both sides, we're really excited about being what I would consider one of the most powerful commercially available processors that'll be dual architecture," Tina Tarquinio, chief product officer for IBM Z and LinuxONE, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. The announcement marks the first hardware milestone from the strategic collaboration IBM and Arm unveiled in April, and it offers an unusually direct answer to a question that has shadowed the mainframe for years: can the machine that processes most of the world's regulated financial transactions remain a first-class citizen in an AI era built largely on other people's silicon? How IBM engineered a processor core that speaks two instruction sets The most striking engineering decision is what IBM chose not to do. The company could have bolted a handful of standalone Arm cores onto the side of its processor -- a simpler design that other chipmakers have used for heterogeneous computing. Instead, IBM built every core on the chip to be bilingual. "On this chip are 11 cores, and each core can dynamically switch back and forth between Arm software mode and traditional Z software mode," Jacobi explained in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "That enables us to run the mission-critical enterprise software right next, on the same chip, to the much broader software ecosystem of Arm applications." The mechanism relies on the open-source KVM hypervisor. Enterprises can run Arm64 Linux virtual machines and Linux on Z virtual machines side by side, and as the hypervisor dispatches each virtual machine onto a physical core, the core flips into the corresponding mode. The performance penalty, Jacobi said, is effectively zero. "That switch takes about the nanosecond scale," he said. "Because you're running for many milliseconds in the virtual image, this switching overhead sort of amortizes to zero -- pretty much no impact at all." Traditional z/OS workloads run in a separate partition on the same chip, outside KVM -- meaning a bank's core ledger, its fraud models, and a modern Arm-native monitoring stack can all share the same silicon, the same memory fabric, and the same reliability guarantees. Jacobi was candid that IBM debated the easier path and rejected it. "We're really not addressing their need if we just have a few, I'd say, loosely Arm cores in the corner of the chip," he said. "It really needed to be deeply integrated into the entire system design for it to have the same qualities of service that clients are used to." The specifications underscore that this is no compromise design. Built on a leading-edge 2-nanometer process node, the chip runs its 11 high-performance cores at a base frequency above 5.7 GHz -- extraordinarily fast by industry standards -- with on-chip AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture. Full systems will scale to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. "That's really, really fast compared to what you otherwise get in the industry," Jacobi said. "It's just another example of how mainframe technology is not old technology. It's very modern, leading-edge technology." Why the mainframe needed Arm's 22 million developers The strategic logic behind the chip is about software, not hardware. IBM's s390x architecture runs an enormous share of the world's mission-critical transactions, but the broader universe of enterprise software -- monitoring tools, security agents, cloud-native middleware, and above all the AI stack of PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, and container workloads -- was built for x86 and, increasingly, for Arm. By Arm's own estimates, close to half of the compute shipped to major hyperscalers in 2025 was Arm-based, driven by AWS Graviton, Google Axion, and Microsoft's Arm silicon. Arm counts more than 22 million developers worldwide. Porting each application to s390x has been a grinding, one-ISV-at-a-time effort, and Tina Tarquinio, chief product officer for IBM Z and LinuxONE, described the calculus bluntly. "No matter how great our ecosystem team is, we would never be able to work with all of them and port them all," she told VentureBeat. "There's a lot of ISVs out there, and so we wanted to make a fundamental, big step-function forward. We took a swing from a technology point of view." Notably, she said customers weren't asking for a dual-architecture chip per se -- they were asking for outcomes. "I wouldn't say our clients were saying, 'Can you please make me a dual-architecture environment?' But they were saying, 'Help me get these surround workloads, or different types of workloads, to run in a quicker-to-market fashion.'" The compatibility promise is ambitious: Arm Linux binaries should run unmodified. "The new Arm capabilities are designed to be 100% binary compatible," Jacobi said. "Once you have, for example, Red Hat Linux for Arm, and you have applications that run on Red Hat Linux for Arm, they will run on the system without modifications." Arm defines the instruction set architecture and supplies validation tooling to guarantee that IBM's implementation behaves identically to every other Arm chip -- while IBM designs and builds the silicon entirely in-house. "Very good partnership. Very solid engineering partnership as well," Jacobi said of the collaboration. What a next-generation Spyre accelerator means for enterprise AI on the mainframe IBM is also previewing the next generation of its Spyre AI accelerator at Hot Chips, and the pairing is not coincidental. The current architecture already offers two tiers of AI: an on-processor accelerator, introduced with the Telum chip in 2022, that handles ultra-low-latency inference such as fraud scoring inside a payment transaction, and the Spyre accelerator card sitting in the I/O subsystem for heavier models. The new Spyre raises the ceiling considerably. "We're also bringing a much higher performance chip that is capable of running large language models for agentic workflows," Jacobi said -- both AI-ops workflows that administer the system itself and business workflows "for things like document understanding and insurance adjudication." The new accelerator will ship with high-bandwidth memory to feed those models. Here the dual-architecture bet and the AI bet converge. Enterprises want to run inference next to their data; the data lives on the mainframe; and the AI tooling is overwhelmingly Arm-native. Mohamed Awad, Arm's executive vice president for cloud AI, framed the announcement in exactly those terms: "As AI scales, more of the computing landscape is converging on Arm. Bringing Arm compute and its software ecosystem to these platforms will extend that momentum into mission-critical enterprise infrastructure to give organizations greater choice in how they deploy AI." The timing tracks with where enterprise AI actually stands. McKinsey's most recent State of AI survey found that while 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, nearly two-thirds have not yet scaled it across the enterprise -- and the companies capturing the most value are those redesigning core workflows rather than running detached pilots. For regulated industries whose systems of record sit on IBM Z, running AI where the transactions happen is arguably the most direct route to that kind of integration. When the dual-architecture IBM Z system will ship -- and why existing customers shouldn't worry Buyers will need patience. The chip will debut in the successor to the z17, which shipped in the second quarter of 2025, and IBM holds to a roughly three-year product cadence -- pointing to a launch around 2028. But Tarquinio insisted the program is well past the concept stage. "It's more than being on the drawing board. We're full steam ahead on the whole system," she said, adding that IBM will release more details in the run-up to launch. For IBM's installed base, the reflexive question is whether embracing Arm signals a slow sunset for the traditional architecture. Both executives pushed back hard. "This is a big and. It is not an or," Tarquinio said. "I have a roadmap that goes out 10 or 15 years of hardware systems. Many of our teams are working on this next system; many are also working on the one after that, and the one after that." Jacobi cast the move as continuity rather than rupture. "The traditional mainframe that we have today as a z17 system is not just a faster version of what we built 25 years ago," he said. "We didn't have pervasive encryption capabilities. We didn't have on-processor AI capabilities. Adding the Arm capability is the next big iteration in this continuous evolution." The competitive subtext is the cloud. Asked why an enterprise would run Arm workloads on a mainframe instead of a hyperscaler, Tarquinio pointed to the platform's availability numbers: "We're talking eight nines of availability -- that's 0.3 seconds of downtime a year. If you're running your ledger, if you're running your fraud detection, any of these mission-critical apps, you want that." The pitch, she said, is fit for purpose: match the infrastructure to the SLA, not the fashion. There are real caveats. IBM's own press release notes that statements of future direction "represent goals and objectives only." The Arm support is Linux-only for now, and the hardest engineering -- running a foreign instruction set at production performance, with mainframe-grade fault detection and recovery, under real customer workloads -- remains to be proven over the next two years. But the ambition is unmistakable. For sixty years, the mainframe has survived every wave of technology that was supposed to kill it -- minicomputers, client-server, the cloud -- by absorbing what it needed from each. Now IBM is attempting its boldest act of absorption yet: teaching the machine that runs the world's money to speak the language of the AI era, fluently and natively, on the same silicon. "Bringing something that'll really be first of its kind in production," Tarquinio said, "showcases again what IBM is capable of from a technology point of view." The mainframe, it turns out, isn't being left behind by the future. It's learning to run it.

Two architectures on one chip: Arm and IBM team up in a legendary crossover, but alas it's for 'enterprise infrastructure'

Though us PC gamers are unlikely to get the benefit of it, sometimes some new bit of PC hardware comes out of the enterprise market that just makes you go 'huh, that's neat'. Today, it's a new chip from IBM made in collaboration with Arm that runs architectures from both companies on a single chip. That means it will be able to run Arm-based Linux environments as well as IBM's z/OS, and the software that comes with both. Prior to this, running multiple sets of instructions would require emulating the right instructions, ie, turning instructions from one architecture to another that can actually be processed by the cores. Though we won't know how well it runs in use until the chip actually launches, it's still an interesting bit of tech that could be more versatile long-term. Combining two different architectures in one chip is very uncommon, though not unprecedented. The Register spoke to tech analyst George Cozma, and he explained: "Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot... The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly." Arm says it is built for "the next era of enterprise infrastructure", and that includes, as one might expect, cloud and AI infrastructure. Its current chips are reportedly used by over 22 million developers worldwide, including businesses like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. Given Arm's significant developer support, IBM is likely looking to tap into this market with this collaboration, and Arm would benefit from the in with IBM and its customers. The new chip is a pretty beefy one. Built on a 2 nm technology node (which not even the best gaming CPUs use yet) and containing 11 high-performance cores, it is said to operate at more than 5.7 GHz. It also has AI inference accelerators and an on-chip data processing unit for I.O. It seems like an impressive chip, which I suppose is to be expected with the current cloud and AI market. IBM and Arm claim that this collaboration will get the best out of IBM's reliability, security, and scalability, whilst using Arm's power-efficient architecture, and "workload enablement expertise, and broad software ecosystem." Mohamed Awad, the Executive Vice President of the Cloud AI Business Unit for Arm, argues, "As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run across a broader range of environments." He continues, "Our collaboration with IBM builds on this progress, extending the Arm ecosystem into mission-critical enterprise environments and giving organizations greater flexibility in how they deploy and scale these workloads." Naturally, an advanced new chip specifically built for use in enterprise environments won't exactly get you good gaming, but sometimes, those enterprise environments are doing cool things with tech. It's just a shame that the explosion of AI has to take so much PC hardware with it in the process. Still, Arm's entry into the PC gaming sphere would certainly be easier with a few more bucks in its pockets.

IBM is developing a dual-architecture chip to run Arm-native AI apps on Z mainframes and Linux servers

IBM is developing a dual-architecture chip to run Arm-native AI apps on Z mainframes and Linux servers IBM Corp. said today at the annual Hot Chips 2026 conference that it's developing a groundbreaking new dual-architecture processor in partnership with the British chip design firm Arm Holdings Ltd. that's destined to power its next-generation IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE systems. The new chip, which doesn't yet have a name, is special because it's being designed to run both z/OS and Arm-native Linux workloads simultaneously on the same core, marking the first time that has ever been done. In doing so, it will bring Arm's massive software ecosystem into IBM's ultra-reliable enterprise computing infrastructure, which still runs the vast majority of financial applications today. It's the first concrete development since the two companies announced their strategic partnership in April. Back then, they said they're going to work together to make it possible for Arm-based workloads to run on IBM's enterprise hardware using techniques such as virtualization and emulation. The initial goal was to bring "cloud-like flexibility to highly regulated environments," so enterprises would be able to run artificial intelligence and other data-intensive workloads on sensitive data that's stored in on-premises systems rather than the cloud. However, as Futurum Group analyst Brendan Burke pointed out at the time, virtualized workloads often struggle to match the performance of their non-virtualized counterparts. That's why IBM and Arm have opted to co-design a dual architecture processor that eliminates the need for either virtualization or emulation. The new chip will have a single, unified architecture, which means companies won't have to partition tasks across separate Arm and IBM cores. Instead, the chip's cores will be capable of executing both Arm and IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions concurrently, IBM said. IBM is promising exceptional performance too. The chip will be built on an advanced two-nanometer process node and feature 11 high-performance cores running at speeds of 5.7 gigahertz per second. It also features a dedicated on-chip data processing unit to handle input/output operations, so that the actual cores can dedicate all of their processing heft to the workloads. In addition, there will be AI inference accelerators specifically designed to handle real-time fraud detection in financial transactions. Moreover, if enterprises feel the need to scale up, IBM said the chip will be able to expand to support hundreds of cores. IBM said the new chip will effectively bridge two of the world's biggest computing ecosystems, which have until now always been isolated from each other. The company's IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE systems serve as the backbone of the world's economy, estimated to process around 70% of all financial transactions across the planet. They also handle tasks such as airline reservations and crunch a huge amount of healthcare data too. Meanwhile, Arm has developed a thriving software ecosystem around cloud-native and AI development that's supported by more than 22 million developers. Many of the world's AI applications run on Arm-based chips, and this is of extreme interest to enterprises. However, heavily regulated financial firms are unable to give up on their Z mainframes and LinuxONE systems, which are known for their ironclad security and reliability. But in order to access Arm's software ecosystem, they've had no choice but to forsake IBM's systems. The new chip changes that. IBM Chief Technology Officer and Fellow Christian Jacobi said enterprises need infrastructure solutions that expand their options. "This processor represents a significant architectural advancement for IBM Z and LinuxONE," he said. "By bringing Arm natively to our platforms, 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." IBM's and Arm's dual-processor architecture has the potential to enable a fresh wave of AI adoption by companies in highly regulated industries. Soon, developers will be able to write code for Arm and deploy it directly on mainframes, ensuring that IBM's legacy hardware systems maintain their relevance for years to come.

IBM takes another giant step in the AI race

IBM (IBM) unveiled the first mainframe processor built to run two rival computing architectures on a single core, disclosing the design at the Hot Chips conference on Monday, August 24, according to a press release. Any enterprise architect who has ever been told a piece of software will not run on the mainframe knows the usual workaround: pay a vendor to port it, or route the workload somewhere else entirely. IBM just spent two years building a chip designed to remove that excuse for one of the fastest-growing software ecosystems in computing. Why mainframes couldn't talk to modern AI For three decades, IBM Z has run on z/Architecture, an instruction set almost no software outside mainframe shops has ever targeted. The new chip's 11 cores execute both z/Architecture and Arm instructions natively, without an emulation layer or a separate block of Arm-only cores bolted onto the die, the firm found. That distinction matters because the mainframe now inherits software already built for Arm, including AI servers, smart virtual assistants, and instant search tools that power modern AI, instead of waiting for someone to build a mainframe-specific version first. Without an emulation layer, the chip avoids the slowdowns that happen when hardware constantly translates foreign code. Think of it like a speaker fluent in two languages instead of relying on a middleman interpreter. It allows real-time AI tools to run natively at full speed without stalling mission-critical operations. Built on a 2 nanometer process, the chip packs 11 cores running above 5.7 GHz continuously, according to IBM's announcement. It also includes AI inference accelerators aimed at catching fraudulent transactions in real time, a capability banks lean on for split-second decisions during a live payment. IBM press release The mainframe coder shortage The Arm partnership has as much to do with staffing as silicon, according to Rachita Rao, a senior analyst at Everest Group, in comments to Network World. Banks and insurers resist changing core architecture because of the risk to their ledgers, Rao said, but they also face a dwindling pool of specialists who know how to run z/Architecture systems. Native Arm support lets those firms modernize without retraining an entire workforce or ripping out systems that still process the bulk of global financial transactions. Rao also framed the move as IBM targeting sovereign and air-gapped computing, the regulated workloads that cannot move to public cloud infrastructure. That is a narrower market than the hyperscale data centers where Arm has already won, but it is one where IBM faces little direct competition. IBM leadership framed the move as a direct response to that modernization push. 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. Why was Wall Street quiet? IBM shares were fractionally lower and Arm slipped 2.4% in premarket trading following the announcement. That muted reaction fits how early the product still is. IBM gave no shipping date, no pricing, and no name for the chip, so any financial impact sits years out. The announcement lands amid a broader buildout of IBM's AI infrastructure bets, including an expanded Nvidia partnership to bring Blackwell Ultra GPUs to IBM Cloud, an $11 billion acquisition of data-streaming company Confluent, and a partnership with OpenAI. IBM's parallel Nvidia expansion signals the company is not treating Arm compatibility as its primary answer to AI at scale, since large models still run on GPU-heavy infrastructure. Arm's role is narrower: pulling the software that surrounds those models closer to the data that already lives on the mainframe. IBM also cleared a pricing obstacle that had discouraged this kind of consolidation. Red Hat moved to per-socket-pair pricing with cost parity across x86, IBM Z, LinuxONE, and Power shortly after Arm partnership was announced in April, per Moor Insights & Strategy, removing a structural penalty that made mainframe deployments more expensive per core regardless of how efficiently that core ran. Arm's last holdout is starting to open up Arm chips already power roughly half of the new compute capacity added by the largest hyperscalers, with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each building custom Arm silicon for their own clouds. The mainframe was the one corner of enterprise computing that shift never reached, walled off by decades of software written for a single instruction set. IBM's chip does not tear that wall down immediately. Pricing for non-IBM software, distribution certification, and vendor support on Arm workloads remain undefined, and the earliest systems are not expected before 2027. What changes is the assumption underneath it. The architecture now dominating cloud and AI infrastructure is no longer locked out of the systems that still run much of the world's banking and insurance backbone. That shift will shape enterprise computing decisions for longer than any single quarter's stock reaction suggests. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 25, 2026 at 8:17 AM.

IBM Announces First Dual-Architecture Mainframe Processor for IBM Z and Linuxone

IBM announced the first dual-architecture mainframe processor, which is being 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 organizations 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. 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 prioritizing 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. This milestone represents a major step forward in IBM and Arm's shared vision of expanding application choice and access to the latest in software innovation for enterprise computing without compromising the capabilities these environments demand.