IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

4/2/2026 at 10:16:47 AM

Ah, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today

"KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM"

"By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....."

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/...

by mcbridematt

4/2/2026 at 10:54:19 AM

Z/OS for ARM then? ;-)

I’ve been running VM/370 and MVS on my RPi cluster for a long time now.

by rbanffy

4/2/2026 at 10:28:38 AM

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

by mykowebhn

4/2/2026 at 10:59:03 AM

A better question would probably what they don't do; just going off the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.""), etc etc etc.

Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.

by Cthulhu_

4/2/2026 at 10:49:27 AM

I work for a big international corp. We pay IBM a blankest sum annually because it’s that hard to quantify just how much we rely on their services and licensing costs.

Licensing of course just being typical rent seeking behaviour but their services are valuable given the financial impact if one of their solutions goes down on us (which is very rarely)

by bargainbin

4/2/2026 at 10:36:41 AM

IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies.

IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.

by Frieren

4/2/2026 at 10:53:37 AM

They design their own CPUs, and they sold $15b of hardware last year. Tellum ii in the z17 mainframe is a Samsung 5nm part.

What I don't get however is who'd use their custom accelerators for AI inference.

by jeswin

4/2/2026 at 10:40:13 AM

So they had $30 billion in software revenue last year and $15 billion in infrastructure against $20 billion in consulting.

by ghaff

4/2/2026 at 10:44:40 AM

I was surprised to find out they still have hardware repair technicians (extremely expensive but reliable: ~$400 per computer around 2022 iirc)

But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer

by lmpdev

4/2/2026 at 11:00:20 AM

No, IBM has Unisys contractors, not employees. All the techs I’ve worked with from IBM have been a nightmare. One dropped an entire drive array on the ground, and tried to install it despite it being bent and no longer fitting on the rack. I have been acquired by IBM twice. They are a nightmare, horrible company.

by quietsegfault

4/2/2026 at 10:53:01 AM

They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER.

Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications.

They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.

by shrimppersimmon

4/2/2026 at 10:52:32 AM

When you’re that large and established it’s very hard to die. I expect IBM to exist in some form pretty much forever

by dgellow

4/2/2026 at 10:58:23 AM

They exist to swallow up profitable companies, extract any “unnecessary” overhead (like benefits, PTO, pay that isn’t rock bottom), and package into large enterprise licensing agreements.

by quietsegfault

4/2/2026 at 10:33:22 AM

Mainframes and consulting.

by dogma1138

4/2/2026 at 10:34:11 AM

I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.

by p-e-w

4/2/2026 at 9:30:03 AM

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security

I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI.

So why would IBM add ARM?

> 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

I think it has become too expensive for IBM to develop their own CPU architecture and that ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price.

So IBM wants to switch to ARM without making a too big fuzz about it.

by silvestrov

4/2/2026 at 10:20:05 AM

Im thinking maybe as a compliment to x86 offerings and eventual displacement as a primary offering , i do not see them ditching POWER.

The architecture might be non-standard and not very widespread however for what it does and workloads that are suited to it. I dont think any ARM design comes close , maybe Fujitsu's A64FX.

by rzerowan

4/2/2026 at 10:50:28 AM

Marketingwise I think it is difficult for IBM to sell x86 systems as it is too easy for customers to compare performance to a standard Wintel server.

Sun had the same problem after 2001 dotcom when standard PC servers became reliable enough to run web servers on.

It's easier to sell "our special sauce" when building using a custom ARM platform. Then you have no easy comparison with standard servers.

by silvestrov

4/2/2026 at 9:41:05 AM

> ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price

Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point

by tempay

4/2/2026 at 10:34:30 AM

AI= Arm Ibm in that case

by homarp

4/2/2026 at 10:35:22 AM

Once you parse the marketing speak, looks like there may be ARM ISA silicon in future System Z.

But, what are their legacy finance-sector customers asking for here? Are they trying to add ARM to LinuxONE, while maintaining the IBM hardware-based nine nines uptime strategy/sweet support contract paradigm?

If so, why don't the Visas of the world just buy 0xide, for example?

> develop new dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security.

> "This moment marks the latest step in our innovation journey for future generations of our IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, reinforcing our end-to-end system design as a powerful advantage."

by nxobject

4/2/2026 at 10:46:22 AM

I think the #1 use case here is allowing AI/cloud workloads the ability to execute against the mainframe's data without ever leaving the secure bubble. I.e., bring the applications to the data rather than the data to the applications.

IBM could put an entire 1k core ARM mini-cloud inside a Z series configuration and it could easily be missed upon visual inspection. Imagine being able to run banking apps with direct synchronous SQL access to core and callbacks for things like real-time fraud detection. Today, you'd have to do this with networked access into another machine or a partner's cloud which kills a lot of use cases.

If I were IBM, I would set up some kind of platform/framework/marketplace where B2B vendors publish ARM-based apps that can run on Z. Apple has already demonstrated that we can make this sort of thing work quite well with regard to security and how locked down everything can be.

by bob1029

4/2/2026 at 9:26:42 AM

I wonder if we end up with z series running on arm long term.

The value in z series is in the system design and ecosystem, IBM could engineer an architecture migration to custom CPUs based on ARM cores. They would still be mainframe processors, but likely able to be able to reduce investment in silicon and supporting software.

by jlawer

4/2/2026 at 9:45:45 AM

You can run 1960s System/360 binaries unmodified on modern z/OS. The system also uses a lot of "high level assembler" and "system provided assembly macros" making a complete architecture switch extremely painful and complicated.

They called their new architecture "ESAME" for a while for a pretty obvious reason.

by themafia

4/2/2026 at 10:53:45 AM

AIX for ARM? ;-)

by rbanffy

4/2/2026 at 10:02:11 AM

April fools day was yesterday, IBM.

by nubinetwork

4/2/2026 at 10:41:13 AM

Arm co processors for main frames?

by christkv

4/2/2026 at 10:40:22 AM

Is that good or bad?

My gut feeling says to lean more on the bad side. I am very skeptic when corporations announce "this is for the win". Then I slowly walk over to the Google Graveyard and nod my head wisely in sadness ... https://killedbygoogle.com/

by shevy-java

4/2/2026 at 9:12:30 AM

TLDR; “fine, we’ll support Arm too because customers want it.”

by jonkoops

4/2/2026 at 9:23:44 AM

Is that such a silly notion?

by ghaff

4/2/2026 at 9:35:44 AM

Arm is trying to expend it's horizons every where as in the previous year ARM acquired the Arduino.

by mafzal9

4/2/2026 at 9:40:45 AM

No, it was Qualcomm who acquired Arduino. While they are an ARM licensee who make ARM chips, they are not ARM.

by VorpalWay