IBM, Arm eye dual technology layer for AI, mission critical workloads

IBM and Arm said they will collaborate on dual-architecture hardware aimed at AI and data intensive workloads.

With the deal, IBM will aim to incorporate Arm chips into mission critical workloads that are often handled by IBM's Z systems.

For Arm, the IBM partnership is key to driving enterprise adoption of its architecture, which is already a regular in hyperscale environments as well as the enterprise. Arm recently launched its own CPUs in a move that expands beyond licensing.

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Arm recently announced plans for its own AI chip for inference. Arm said it landed OpenAI and Meta as customers for its AGI CPU. The AGI CPU is built on Arm's Neoverse architecture , which is already used in AWS Graviton, Google Axion, Microsoft Cobalt and Nvidia Vera. Arm's AGI CPU already has a bevy of launch partners.

The IBM and Arm partnership could mean that Arm rides along with mainframes and mission critical workloads. Initial efforts of the IBM and Arm partnership revolve around the following:

• Expanding virtualization to allow Arm-based software environments to work within IBM's enterprise systems.
• Streamline how developers and enterprises bring Arm applications into enterprise environments.
• Improve performance and efficiency for AI and data workloads while maintaining security and local data sovereignty.
• Broaden the software ecosystem by creating shared technology layers between IBM and Arm platforms.