Two architectures on one chip: Arm and IBM team up in a legendary crossover, but alas it's for 'enterprise infrastructure

Though us PC gamers are unlikely to get the benefit of it, sometimes some new bit of PC hardware comes out of the enterprise market that just makes you go 'huh, that's neat'. Today, it's a new chip from IBM made in collaboration with Arm that runs architectures from both companies on a single chip. That means it will be able to run Arm-based Linux environments as well as IBM's z/OS, and the software that comes with both.

Prior to this, running multiple sets of instructions would require emulating the right instructions, ie, turning instructions from one architecture to another that can actually be processed by the cores. Though we won't know how well it runs in use until the chip actually launches, it's still an interesting bit of tech that could be more versatile long-term.

Combining two different architectures in one chip is very uncommon, though not unprecedented. The Register spoke to tech analyst George Cozma , and he explained: "Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot… The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly."

Arm says it is built for "the next era of enterprise infrastructure", and that includes, as one might expect, cloud and AI infrastructure. Its current chips are reportedly used by over 22 million developers worldwide, including businesses like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google.

Given Arm's significant developer support, IBM is likely looking to tap into this market with this collaboration, and Arm would benefit from the in with IBM and its customers.

(Image credit: Akos Stiller - Getty Images)

The new chip is a pretty beefy one. Built on a 2 nm technology node (which not even the best gaming CPUs use yet) and containing 11 high-performance cores, it is said to operate at more than 5.7 GHz. It also has AI inference accelerators and an on-chip data processing unit for I.O. It seems like an impressive chip, which I suppose is to be expected with the current cloud and AI market.

IBM and Arm claim that this collaboration will get the best out of IBM's reliability, security, and scalability, whilst using Arm's power-efficient architecture, and "workload enablement expertise, and broad software ecosystem."

Mohamed Awad, the Executive Vice President of the Cloud AI Business Unit for Arm, argues , "As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run across a broader range of environments."

He continues, "Our collaboration with IBM builds on this progress, extending the Arm ecosystem into mission-critical enterprise environments and giving organizations greater flexibility in how they deploy and scale these workloads."

Naturally, an advanced new chip specifically built for use in enterprise environments won't exactly get you good gaming, but sometimes, those enterprise environments are doing cool things with tech. It's just a shame that the explosion of AI has to take so much PC hardware with it in the process.

Still, Arm's entry into the PC gaming sphere would certainly be easier with a few more bucks in its pockets.

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