IBM has a proud tradition of slapping on special-purpose function blocks, to keep mainframes performance-competitve in the long evolution of System/360. Of part

IBM has a proud tradition of slapping on special-purpose function blocks, to keep mainframes performance-competitve in the long evolution of System/360. Of particular interest are the "specialised-function-assist instructions", from SHA-256 signature computation, AES-128 encryption, and ECC-* based public key cryptography (p81) to DEFLATE de/compression (p68), DMA timestamping (p86) and good 'ol vector HPC vector computation (p129), including packed decimal vector computation (p130). "Neural network processing" (p1795) is particularly amusing.