IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Arm on Monday unveiled a dual-architecture mainframe processor designed to run both IBM and Arm operating systems and applications in future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems.
The chip, announced at the Hot Chips conference in August 2026, is built on a 2 nanometer technology node and contains 11 high-performance cores operating at speeds exceeding 5.7 GHz. Each core is architected to natively and concurrently execute both Arm and IBM Z (or LinuxONE) instructions, allowing organizations to run Arm-native Linux environments alongside z/OS and Linux on IBM Z.
The processor integrates AI inference accelerators for real-time fraud detection, an on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture. It also provides hardware-level fault detection and recovery, advanced encryption, and secure key management. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms can scale to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory.
The collaboration between IBM and Arm, established in April 2026, leverages Arm’s software ecosystem, which supports more than 22 million developers worldwide. Christian Jacobi, Chief Technology Officer and IBM Fellow at IBM Systems Development, said the processor represents a significant architectural advancement for IBM Z and LinuxONE by combining access to a fast-growing ecosystem with the reliability of IBM systems.
IBM plans to integrate the new processor into future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, with first deployments expected in 2027.
