The value in z series is in the system design and ecosystem, IBM could engineer an architecture migration to custom CPUs based on ARM cores. They would still be mainframe processors, but likely able to be able to reduce investment in silicon and supporting software.
They called their new architecture "ESAME" for a while for a pretty obvious reason.
I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI.
So why would IBM add ARM?
> 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
I think it has become too expensive for IBM to develop their own CPU architecture and that ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price.
So IBM wants to switch to ARM without making a too big fuzz about it.
Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point
The architecture might be non-standard and not very widespread however for what it does and workloads that are suited to it. I dont think any ARM design comes close , maybe Fujitsu's A64FX.
"KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM"
"By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....."
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/...
jonkoops•1h ago
ghaff•1h ago