At the annual Hot Chips conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today is announcing the first dual-architecture mainframe processor, which is being designed to enable enterprises to run operating systems and applications on both the IBM and Arm compute platforms in future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. This marks the first processor milestone to emerge from the IBM and Arm collaboration established in April 2026, and represents a significant advance in enterprise computing. The new processor is being developed to allow organizations to run Arm-native Linux environments simultaneously with z/OS and Linux on IBM Z, while benefiting from IBM's established security, reliability, and scale.

With more than 22 million developers worldwide, the Arm software ecosystem supports a broad and growing range of applications from cloud to edge, including the cloud-native and AI software increasingly shaping modern infrastructure. This new processor will bring that ecosystem to the IBM platforms known globally for transaction processing and data-intensive operations. Arm workloads will benefit from IBM's enterprise-grade capabilities, including enhanced reliability, hardware-level fault detection and recovery, advanced encryption, secure key management, and AI acceleration.

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor's design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and Linux ONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform's established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory.