At the annual Hot Chips conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the first dual-architecture mainframe processor, designed to enable enterprises to run operating systems and applications on both IBM and Arm® compute platforms in future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. This marks the first processor milestone from the IBM and Arm collaboration established in April 2026.

The processor will allow organizations to run Arm-native Linux environments simultaneously with z/OS and Linux on IBM Z, while benefiting from IBM's security, reliability, and scale. With over 22 million developers worldwide, the Arm software ecosystem supports a broad range of applications, including cloud-native and AI software.

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor contains 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit, and a large cache architecture. Each core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions concurrently.

Christian Jacobi, IBM Fellow, highlighted the architectural advancement, while Mohamed Awad of Arm noted the convergence on Arm as AI scales. This milestone expands application choice for enterprise computing without compromising performance.