IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

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.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#5

Post by silvestrov » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security

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.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#6

Post by mafzal9 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

Arm is trying to expend it's horizons every where as in the previous year ARM acquired the Arduino.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#7

Post by VorpalWay » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

mafzal9 wrote: post #6

Arm is trying to expend it's horizons every where as in the previous year ARM acquired the Arduino.

No, it was Qualcomm who acquired Arduino. While they are an ARM licensee who make ARM chips, they are not ARM.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#8

Post by tempay » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

silvestrov wrote: post #5

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security 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…

> ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price

Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#9

Post by themafia » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

jlawer wrote: post #4

I wonder if we end up with z series running on arm long term. 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.

You can run 1960s System/360 binaries unmodified on modern z/OS. The system also uses a lot of "high level assembler" and "system provided assembly macros" making a complete architecture switch extremely painful and complicated.

They called their new architecture "ESAME" for a while for a pretty obvious reason.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#10

Post by nubinetwork » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:02 AM UTC

April fools day was yesterday, IBM.