IBM Reinvents The CPU, SiFive Drives RISC-V Into The Data Center

IBM came out with an announcement on a dual ISA processor, so two instruction sets supported in one architecture, IBM Z instruction set.

which is a cisc instruction set complex instruction set and then arms instruction set is also supported which is a risk so you have risk and cisc on the same core design jim i know you've been tracking this Enlighten me how the heck this works.

This is amazing because this is the first time we've seen this.

And yeah, and you're right, Dave, because hot chips is like drinking from a fire hose.

And they kicked off the conference with this presentation.

And this is a major announcement.

We've never seen this before.

Supporting two instruction sets.

Basically, what they did was they and this isn't just two processors lumped together.

They added some core logic that they needed to support, especially registers to support the ARM instruction set, but the rest of it was just modifying other parts of the Z architecture.

This will be in their next generation Z processor, which presumably will be late 2027, early 2028 probably.

They didn't name it, but if they go along their current naming structure, it'll be Z18.

It's additions to the hardware and additions to the software.

Basically, the software structure is going to be able to determine, is this an ARM or Z-based instruction? Then it's going to basically funnel it down the right funnels and process it properly.

It's going to be able to do these.

It still is doing it one or the others at a time.

It's not doing them in parallel.

but this is very unique this opens up a lot of opportunities for the z architecture you have to remember that there's never been two architectures in the data center.

And a lot of the architectures outside of the host processor have traditionally been risk-based solutions, whether it was MIPS, PowerPC, or now ARM being the dominant architecture in there for things such as security, networking, storage, and stuff like that.

All of those solutions typically are running ARM processors.

So this gives, this makes the Z architecture and the Z rack um which they still call a mainframe but it is still a rack level architecture it gives it a lot more flexibility in interacting with those other systems or even being a basis for those other systems going forward

interesting stuff so z architecture that's that's the uh the difference here folks that might not be familiar this is ibm's uh proprietary instruction set jim i'm going to go back to you again real quick you mentioned the word mainframe ibm builds servers for different applications than the average cloud server or even an AI server.

It's more of a big data analytics platform, right? I mean, what are we talking about here? I know ARM is sort of maybe the traffic cop cores on the chip or supporting IO, things like that.

What are we talking about for the core application for this beast?

Well, the Z architecture, and quite honestly, IBM's mainframe architectures, all of their architectures, have really been designed around that high reliability, highly confidential type of computing applications.