BM announced the latest version of the IBM mainframe hardware with more updates especially developed to support and speed up the adoption of
artificial intelligence. The company announced yesterday the new IBM z17 which represents the newest version of the IBM mainframe computer hardware powered by IBM Telum II processor. It is a fully encrypted mainframe and can be used in more than 250 artificial intelligence applications, such as AI agents or generative AI.
Even though mainframes are considered to be an outdated approach, it should be mentioned that they are currently used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies. The mainframe market was estimated last year at about $5.3 billion.
So, the new IBM z17 is able to process more than 450 billion inference operations every day, which represents almost a 50% increase compared with the previous IBM z16 model that was released 3 years ago. IBM z17 is developed to be integrated fully with different software, open-source, or hardware tools.
According to the VP of product management and design for the IBM Z series, Tina Tarquinio, all IBM teams have been working for more than 5 years to develop and launch this new upgrade for their IBM mainframe. With more than 2,000 research hours to develop IBM z117, the company hopes that their work will be appreciated in the industry and more and more companies will adopt their new mainframe.
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“It has been wild knowing that we’re introducing an AI accelerator, and then seeing, especially in the latter half of 2022, all of the changes in the industry regarding AI. It’s been exciting. I think the biggest point has been [that] we don’t know what we don’t know about what’s coming, right? So the possibilities are unlimited in terms of what AI can help us do.”, Tina stated for TechCrunch.
Keep in mind that this IBM z17 mainframe is designed to evolve alongside the artificial intelligence market. So, upon launch, the mainframe will feature 48 IBM Spyre AI accelerator chips, with plans to increase this number to 96 in the next 12 months.
“We are purposely building in headroom. “We’re purposely building in AI agility. So as new models are introduced, [we’re] making sure that we’ve built in the headroom for bigger, larger models — models that maybe need more local memory to talk to each other. We’ve built in that because we know it’s really the approach that will change, right? The new models will come and go.”, the VP of product and design for the IBM Z series also stated.
Stay tuned for more updates!
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