IBM And Arm Join Forces To Develop Dual Architecture Hardware For The AI Era

IBM and Arm are teaming up to develop new dual-architecture hardware for next-generation AI and data intensive workloads, the companies jointly announced today. It comes on the heels of Arm entering the merchant silicon market with an AI data center CPU to challenge x86. That said, it sounds like this collaboration is mostly focused getting Arm software to run on IBM's mainframes and hardware platforms, with three main goals.

The first goal is to explore how to expand virtualization technologies to enable Arm-based software environments to function within IBM's enterprise platforms. Doing so will streamline how developers and enterprise clients inject Arm's applications into mission critical environments.

A second goal is to explore ways to support the performance efficiency demands of modern workloads as the AI era takes hold (no worries of an AI market bubble popping, as far as IBM and Arm are concerned). A key part of this is having enterprise platforms be able to execute Arm applications, "with the goal of helping Arm-based environments align with the reliability, security, and operational requirements enterprises need," IBM says.

The third goal is to facilitate long-term platform growth through shared technology layers between platforms. This will enable broader software ecosystems and increase flexibility in deploying and managing applications, ultimately giving enterprises a wider array of choices.

"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," said Mohamed Awad, Executive Vice President, Cloud AI Business Unit, Arm. "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."

The broad appeal here for enterprise clients is being able to take advantage of Arm's power-efficiency architectures within IBM's mainframe ecosystems. Tina Tarquinio, Chief Product Officer of IBM Z and LinuxONE, called this a natural extension to IBM's hardware and systems innovation, and plays into firm's goal of anticipate enterprise needs before reaching market inflection points.

It's too early to tell how this will ultimately play out, but this partnership could alter how customers build and scale computing platforms in the AI era.