The Odd Couple: Why IBM Is Welding ARM Chips Onto Its Half-Century-Old Mainframe Architecture

The Odd Couple: Why IBM Is Welding ARM Chips Onto Its Half-Century-Old Mainframe Architecture

IBM and ARM have struck a partnership that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. The two companies announced a collaboration to enable ARM-based workloads to run natively on IBM Z mainframes — those room-sized machines that still process roughly 70% of the world’s transaction data, according to IBM’s own figures. The deal pairs ARM’s energy-efficient chip designs, dominant in smartphones and increasingly in data centers, with IBM’s fortress-gra…