IBM Z mainframes get AI boost with new Telum II processor, Spyre accelerator [Video]

At the Hot Chips 2024 conference, IBM announced its Telum II processor and previewed its Spyre accelerator for AI and other high-performance Big Iron workloads.

Credit: IBM

IBM is outfitting the next generation of its Z and LinuxONE mainframes with its latest Telum processor and a new accelerator aimed at boosting performance of AI and other data-intensive workloads.

The new processor, the IBM Telum II, has greater memory and cache capacity than the previous generation, and it integrates a new data processing unit (DPU) specialized for IO acceleration along with enhanced on-chip AI acceleration capabilities.

Developed using Samsung 5nm technology, Telum II has eight high-performance cores running at 5.5GHz, according to IBM. It includes a 40% increase in on-chip cache capacity with virtual L3 and virtual L4 growing to 360MB and 2.88GB, respectively.

“The compute power of each accelerator is expected to be improved by 4x, reaching 24 trillion operations per second (TOPS). But TOPS alone don’t …