7 ms·
IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
- jonkoops 7mo agoTLDR; “fine, we’ll support Arm too because customers want it.”
- jlawer 7mo agoI 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.
- themafia 7mo agoYou 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.
- kjs3 7mo agoI don't think that would change if the underlying architecture changes; IBM has been committed to backward compatibility for a long time. Some hypothetical future mainframe class IBM ARM would undoubtedly be able virtualize a 360/370/390 without breaking a sweat. And ARM will undoubtedly enable IBM to add custom emulation hardware to their spin on ARM if they need it.
- silvestrov 7mo ago> 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.
- tempay 7mo ago> 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
- mbreese 7mo agoI thought PPC was supposed to be highly performant, but not very efficient. I didn’t think ARM (at least non-Apple ARM) was hitting that level of performance yet. I thought ARM was by far more efficient, but not quite there in terms of raw performance. But I could be wrong… I’m going from a historical perspective. I haven’t checked PPC benchmarks in quite a while.
- kjs3 7mo agoAre you guys sure you're not confusing product lines? PPC is a PowerISA architecture, but hasn't been pushing desktop/server level performance for, what, almost 20 years? It's an embedded chip now, and AFAIK IBM doesn't even make them any more. Power (currently "10th gen"(-ish)) is the performant aarchitecture, used in the computers formally known as i-Series, formerly known as RS/6000. It's pretty fast, not not price competitive. They aren't really the same thing.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
- mafzal9 7mo agoArm is trying to expend it's horizons every where as in the previous year ARM acquired the Arduino.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoNo, it was Qualcomm who acquired Arduino. While they are an ARM licensee who make ARM chips, they are not ARM.
- woadwarrior01 7mo agoAlso, Qualcomm and ARM aren't quite in good terms. https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/09/qualcomm-achieves-complete-victory-over-arm-in-litigation-challe https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/09/qualcomm-achi...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nubinetwork 7mo agoApril fools day was yesterday, IBM.
- mcbridematt 7mo agoAh, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today "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/20260402042125.3948963-1-seiden@linux.ibm.com/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/...
- rbanffy 7mo agoZ/OS for ARM then? ;-) I’ve been running VM/370 and MVS on my RPi cluster for a long time now.
- kraftverk_ 7mo agoCool, can you share more about the setup?
- rbanffy 7mo agoA 4x RPi Zero Ws Docker Swarm cluster running the dockerised versions of Hercules with VM/370 Sixpack, VM/370 CE and MVS TK 4. All in an IKEA picture frame.
- trebligdivad 7mo agoOh that's a weird way to do it; they used to have an x86 add on block for mainframes which was just a pile of x86 blades with some integration.
- bombcar 7mo agoI loved the era of "daughter cards" which were just entire computers on a board. things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6b4lYOI0GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6b4lYOI0GQ could get you a really interesting form of multitasking
- mykowebhn 7mo agoThis is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
- dogma1138 7mo agoMainframes and consulting.
- p-e-w 7mo agoI was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.
- freedomben 7mo agoGoogle was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mghackerlady 7mo agomuch, much worse
- freedomben 7mo agoYes I agree, given the direction G has been going. I was disappointed at the time, but it was probably a blessing in disguise
- mghackerlady 7mo agohonestly I think it's a net positive (for me at least) because it ensures Fedora has great POWER support (I'll never be able to afford a POWER machine at this rate, but the architecture is an absolute pleasure to work with whenever I have to)
- nxobject 7mo agoOnce you parse the marketing speak, looks like there may be ARM ISA silicon in future System Z. But, what are their legacy finance-sector customers asking for here? Are they trying to add ARM to LinuxONE, while maintaining the IBM hardware-based nine nines uptime strategy/sweet support contract paradigm? If so, why don't the Visas of the world just buy 0xide, for example? > develop new dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security. > "This moment marks the latest step in our innovation journey for future generations of our IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, reinforcing our end-to-end system design as a powerful advantage."
- shevy-java 7mo agoIs that good or bad? My gut feeling says to lean more on the bad side. I am very skeptic when corporations announce "this is for the win". Then I slowly walk over to the Google Graveyard and nod my head wisely in sadness ... https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- christkv 7mo agoArm co processors for main frames?
- bob1029 7mo agoI think the #1 use case here is allowing AI/cloud workloads the ability to execute against the mainframe's data without ever leaving the secure bubble. I.e., bring the applications to the data rather than the data to the applications. IBM could put an entire 1k core ARM mini-cloud inside a Z series configuration and it could easily be missed upon visual inspection. Imagine being able to run banking apps with direct synchronous SQL access to core and callbacks for things like real-time fraud detection. Today, you'd have to do this with networked access into another machine or a partner's cloud which kills a lot of use cases. If I were IBM, I would set up some kind of platform/framework/marketplace where B2B vendors publish ARM-based apps that can run on Z. Apple has already demonstrated that we can make this sort of thing work quite well with regard to security and how locked down everything can be.
- rbanffy 7mo agoAIX for ARM? ;-)
- mghackerlady 7mo agoIs modern ARM stuff done big-endian? because AIX is exclusively BE iirc
- rbanffy 7mo agoI never said it'd be an easy port, although there was an x86 (and s/390) port back when time itself was new. edit: s/390 is big endian.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7mo agoThat, weirdly, should be fine; ARM is bi-endian in the sense of being perfectly happy to run either way. In fact, the easiest way I know of to test software on a big endian system is to run a perfectly ordinary Raspberry Pi with NetBSD's big endian port for it:)
- mghackerlady 7mo agoYeah, I know ARM is bi-endian (pretty much all non-x86 archs used nowadays are) but the question is if it's actually enough to have a software base for it. NetBSD having an ARM port in BE is great but most arm stuff is done for LE systems since MacOS, and NT, and most Linux stuff is LE. This isn't that much of a problem in the free software world because we like to test things on obscure architectures but for the kind of proprietary stuff that you'd want to run on arm might have problems (assuming it wasn't ported AIX already)
- iSnow 7mo agoIt is wild how ARM - which was kind of a niche company and ISA - has taken the world by storm since the modern smartphone was born. Now their designs make their way upwards to big iron and AI datacenters.
- chrsw 7mo agoMaybe I don't know enough technical details about these CPU architectures or IP agreements, but I don't see why IBM couldn't have done what Arm did but with PowerPC.
- wmf 7mo agoPowerPC doesn't have the organic ecosystem that ARM has.
- chrsw 7mo agoNot now. But my question is, what was stopping IBM from doing what Arm did? We are where we are now and it's too late. But as far as I can see, there was nothing too special about Arm as compared to PowerPC back then, on a technical level.
- panick21_ 7mo agoIBM and 'track record of innovation' ... is a bit of an understatement.
- adolph 7mo agoI wonder how this relates to Linaro, a joint venture of ARM, IBM, and others started in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linaro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linaro
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoIBM is desperate to keep the mainframe relevant. The typical transactional workloads are going to stay on the mainframe, and by bolting on ARM “for AI”they’re giving their customer CIOs a reason to defend their decision to stick with the mainframe.
- bonzini 7mo agoThis certainly has been in the making for longer than the "everything we do must be for AI" bubble. In fact s390 has its own on-die inference engines and they have access to the same caching mechanisms as the main processor (which are quite insane).
- mghackerlady 7mo agoIBM has been on the AI hypetrain since 2018ish iirc
- EdoardoIaga 7mo ago[flagged]
- 3yr-i-frew-up 7mo ago2026 continues to amaze me. I never would have expected such, but now I'm getting used to it. I'm waiting for Apple and Microsoft to announce collaboration. They probably already do, but Apple knows its bad for marketing. I'm not sure I can be surprised anymore.
- _q4yj 7mo agoNvidia tried, it’s IBM turn now
- dev_l1x_be 7mo agoI miss working on Power platforms. It is such a nice system with openfirmware. The world went another way.
- AndrewB234 7mo ago[flagged]
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoIf IBM wants the mainframe to also run AI workloads, why don’t they provide a GPU extension?