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....."
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?
Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and write a robust distributed system on top instead of the other way around.
There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for decades. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are).
IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.
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.
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.
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about.
IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.
Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
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)
Own Red-Hat, thus major contributions to Wayland, GNOME, GCC and Java, at very least.
Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances.
IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations, alongside Aix, and LinuxONE (Linux running on mainframes and micros).
Research in quantum computing, AI, design processes, one of the companies that does huge amounts of patents per year across various fields.
And yes a services company, that is actually a consortium of IBM owned companies many of each under a different brand (which is followed by "an IBM company").
Anyone who can't get any better AI accelerators elsewhere? Last I heard, these things were sold out for years on end. And anyone who can make one, can sell them.
Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace.
IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Maybe I don't know enough technical details about these CPU architectures or IP agreements, but I don't see why IBM couldn't have done what Arm did but with PowerPC.
It is wild how ARM - which was kind of a niche company and ISA - has taken the world by storm since the modern smartphone was born. Now their designs make their way upwards to big iron and AI datacenters.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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/
"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/...
I’ve been running VM/370 and MVS on my RPi cluster for a long time now.
There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for decades. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are).
IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.
Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.
IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.
IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.
Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
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)
Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances.
IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations, alongside Aix, and LinuxONE (Linux running on mainframes and micros).
Research in quantum computing, AI, design processes, one of the companies that does huge amounts of patents per year across various fields.
And yes a services company, that is actually a consortium of IBM owned companies many of each under a different brand (which is followed by "an IBM company").
What I don't get however is who'd use their custom accelerators for AI inference.
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.
IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.
You can see their roadmap here:
https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/
But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer
If IBM runs them into the ground, there's a niche for a copy-cat of the original company that you can just found again. Rinse and repeat.
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.
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.
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.
They will probably market the ARM inclusion similarly - as something that the package provides.
As far as POWER i think only Raptor[1] does direct marketingof the power(hehe) and capabilities
[1]https://www.raptorcs.com/
Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point
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."
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.
They called their new architecture "ESAME" for a while for a pretty obvious reason.
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.
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/
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/09/qualcomm-achi...