Following IBM engineers doing a lot of open-source compiler work around [1]a new "arch15" that we suspected to be IBM z17 with Telum II processors , this morning IBM officially announced their next-generation mainframe hardware.

IBM z17 is advertised as being able to process up to 24 trillion operations per second and their new product page and press release is littered with mentions everywhere of AI and security.

As IBM talked about last year at Hot Chips, the IBM Telum II processors are eight cores running at 5.5GHz and with a 360MB virtual L3 cache and 2.88GB virtual L4 cache. Telum II brings a new data processing unit, I/O advancements, and other features to help accelerate AI workloads.

IBM's z/OS is supported by z17 and there will also be Linux support across RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions at least.

IBM z17 is talked up as being around 50% faster than IBM z16 from three years ago. General availability on the IBM z17 mainframes is expected this summer.

Those interested in IBM mainframes can learn more about the z17 at [2]IBM.com .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-SystemZ-arch15-IBM-z17

[2] https://www.ibm.com/products/z17