IBM is working with Arm to develop a dual-architecture processor for IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE.

SiliconANGLE reported on Aug. 24 that the chip is designed, for the first time, to run z/OS and Arm-native Linux workloads simultaneously on the same core.

The chip has not been named. It uses a single unified architecture so companies do not need to split work between Arm cores and IBM cores. It supports running Arm and IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions together on a single core.

SiliconANGLE said the announcement is the first concrete result since the two companies announced a strategic partnership in April.

At the time, the companies proposed using virtualisation and emulation to run Arm-based workloads on IBM enterprise hardware. The new chip is designed to handle this without virtualisation or emulation.

The chip is built on a 2-nanometre process and is based on 11 high-performance 5.7-gigahertz cores. It also includes an on-chip data processing unit dedicated to input-output tasks and an AI inference accelerator for real-time financial transaction fraud detection. It can scale to hundreds of cores if needed.

IBM aims to use the chip to connect the previously separate mainframe and Arm-based computing ecosystems. IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE are estimated to process about 70 percent of global financial transactions. Arm has built a cloud-native and AI software ecosystem based on more than 22 million developers.