Latest news with #Tarquinio
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
IBM powers up AI-ready z17 mainframe
This story was originally published on CIO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CIO Dive newsletter. IBM rolled out its z17 mainframe, a product line designed for AI computing, in a Tuesday announcement. The units will be generally available on June 18, the company said. The newest member of the Z Systems family was built to run generative and predictive AI workloads and support multi-model applications, Elpida Tzortzatos, IBM fellow and CTO AI on IBM Z and Linux One, said during a virtual briefing last week. Units come equipped with high-capacity Telum II processors and are set up for IBM's Spyre accelerator chips, which the company plans to deliver later this year. As part of the rollout, IBM will introduce a performance management tool called IBM Z Operations Unite in May and release a new version of its mainframe operating system, z/OS 3.2, in Q3 of this year. 'This is a fully engineered stack,' Tina Tarquinio, VP and chief product officer for IBM Z and Linux One, said during the briefing. Mainframes occupy a pivotal position in digital transformation. Organizations have continued to lean on the enterprise workhorse to power core applications despite the impetus to embrace the cloud. The z17 arrives after a solid two-plus year run for its predecessor, the z16, which yielded one of the longest and most consistent periods of revenue growth in the platform's history, IBM SVP and CFO James Kavanaugh said last year. Z systems units run over 70% of global transactions by value, including 90% of credit-card transactions, Tarquinio said, drawing on a survey of more than 2,500 global technology executives conducted last year by Oxford Economics at IBM's behest. 'IBM mainframes hold their value,' John Schick, ISG consulting lead on mainframe computing, told CIO Dive. 'There are z15s that are still in use and being installed as used equipment.' Large language model technologies added another twist to the modernization plot as tech leaders considered the potential cost of running compute-intensive generative AI applications in the cloud. Four in 5 respondents to the Oxford Economics survey said mainframes were a key part of their AI plans. Security and data privacy concerns have also cast a favorable light on mainframe hardware. To bolster Z systems' resilience, IBM built quantum-safe encryption algorithms into the z17, Tarquinio said. In the lead up to the release, the company tapped its customer base for over 2,000 hours of test runs and conducted discovery workshops with over 150 clients, according to Tarquinio. Modernizing legacy applications for deployment on cloud or hybrid infrastructure remains a priority for mainframe users. The z17 will ease this process by leveraging Spyre to power watsonx Code Assistant for Z on-prem, Tarquinio said. In addition to the z17 rollout, IBM acquired data and AI consultancy Hakkoda, the company announced Monday. Financial details of the deal, which closed on April 2, were not disclosed.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
IBM releases a new mainframe built for the age of AI
IBM is releasing the latest version of its mainframe hardware that includes new updates meant to accelerate AI adoption. The hardware and consulting company on Monday announced IBM z17, the latest version of its mainframe computer hardware. This fully encrypted mainframe is powered by an IBM Telum II processor and is designed for more than 250 AI use cases, the company says, including AI agents and generative AI. Mainframes might seem like old hat, but they're used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies today, according to one source. In 2024, the mainframe market was worth an estimated $5.3 billion, per consulting firm Market Research Future. The z17 can process 450 billion inference operations in a day, a 50% increase over its predecessor, the IBM z16, which was released in 2022 and ran on the company's original Tellum processor. The system is designed to be able to fully integrate with other hardware, software, and open-source tools. Tina Tarquinio, VP of product management and design for IBM Z, told TechCrunch that this mainframe upgrade has been in the works for five years — well before the current AI frenzy that started with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022. IBM spent more than 2,000 research hours getting feedback from over 100 customers as it built the z17, Tarquinio said. She thinks it's interesting to see that, now, five years later, the feedback they got aligned with where the market ended up heading. "It has been wild knowing that we're introducing an AI accelerator, and then seeing, especially in the later half of 2022, all of the changes in the industry regarding AI," Tarquinio told TechCrunch. "It's been really 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 really unlimited in terms of what AI can help us do." The z17 is set up to adapt and accommodate where the AI market heads, Tarquinio said. The mainframe will support 48 IBM Spyre AI accelerator chips upon release, with the plan to bring that number up to 96 within 12 months. "We are purposely building in headroom," Tarquinio said. "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." Tarquinio said that one of the highlights of this latest hardware — although she joked it was like being asked to pick her favorite child — is that the z17 is more energy-efficient than its predecessor and supposedly competitors, too. "On-chip, we're increasing the AI acceleration by seven and a half times, but that's five and a half times less energy than you would need to do, like, multi-model on another type of accelerator or platform in the industry," Tarquinio said. The z17 mainframes will become generally available on June 8. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
IBM releases a new mainframe built for the age of AI
IBM is releasing the latest version of its mainframe hardware that includes new updates meant to accelerate AI adoption. The hardware and consulting company on Monday announced IBM z17, the latest version of its mainframe computer hardware. This fully encrypted mainframe is powered by an IBM Telum II processor and is designed for more than 250 AI use cases, the company says, including AI agents and generative AI. Mainframes might seem like old hat, but they're used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies today, according to one source. In 2024, the mainframe market was worth an estimated $5.3 billion, per consulting firm Market Research Future. The z17 can process 450 billion inference operations in a day, a 50% increase over its predecessor, the IBM z16, which was released in 2022 and ran on the company's original Tellum processor. The system is designed to be able to fully integrate with other hardware, software, and open-source tools. Tina Tarquinio, VP of product management and design for IBM Z, told TechCrunch that this mainframe upgrade has been in the works for five years — well before the current AI frenzy that started with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022. IBM spent more than 2,000 research hours getting feedback from over 100 customers as it built the z17, Tarquinio said. She thinks it's interesting to see that, now, five years later, the feedback they got aligned with where the market ended up heading. "It has been wild knowing that we're introducing an AI accelerator, and then seeing, especially in the later half of 2022, all of the changes in the industry regarding AI," Tarquinio told TechCrunch. "It's been really 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 really unlimited in terms of what AI can help us do." The z17 is set up to adapt and accommodate where the AI market heads, Tarquinio said. The mainframe will support 48 IBM Spyre AI accelerator chips upon release, with the plan to bring that number up to 96 within 12 months. "We are purposely building in headroom," Tarquinio said. "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." Tarquinio said that one of the highlights of this latest hardware — although she joked it was like being asked to pick her favorite child — is that the z17 is more energy-efficient than its predecessor and supposedly competitors, too. "On-chip, we're increasing the AI acceleration by seven and a half times, but that's five and a half times less energy than you would need to do, like, multi-model on another type of accelerator or platform in the industry," Tarquinio said. The z17 mainframes will become generally available on June 8.
