IBM and Arm have announced a groundbreaking collaboration resulting in a new chip designed to run architectures from both companies on a single piece of silicon. This development aims to serve the enterprise infrastructure market, including cloud and AI workloads. Unlike previous methods that relied on emulation to run software for different instruction sets, this chip can natively execute both Arm-based Linux environments and IBM's z/OS operating system.
This integration of multiple architectures on one chip is rare, though not entirely unprecedented. Historical parallels include IBM's 1990s PowerPC 615, which could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active instruction set selected at boot. That chip was reportedly considered for Apple during its cloning era but never saw public release.
The new chip is built on a 2nm process technology and features 11 high-performance cores reportedly capable of operating at over 5.7 GHz. It also incorporates AI inference accelerators and an on-chip data processing unit for I/O operations. Arm states the chip is intended for the "next era of enterprise infrastructure," focusing on scalability, reliability, and security, leveraging Arm's power-efficient architecture and extensive software ecosystem. This collaboration seeks to combine IBM's established strengths in enterprise computing with Arm's widespread developer support and its presence in over 22 million developer environments globally.