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  • Hacker News
  • why is IBM moving forward that way
  • "AI acceleration for in transaction fraud detection", sounds interesting but also quite risky. Is it just a generic inference accelerator or something more exotic?
  • Is this like the Transmeta processors doing code translation in hardware?
  • Huh. ARM instead of ppc64le?
  • This feels like a baby step towards Arm being able to emulate z/Arch workloads, maybe with a bit of secret sauce for certain specific operations, which doesn't seem very much like IBM.
  • The article is quite short on details but I wonder if this is an ARM core that can also execute IBM Z, or the other way around; in other words, which ISA does it execute its first instruction at the reset vector? In that past I've worked on a conceptual design for an "x86+" CPU, which would start as a regular x86 but then be able to execute code of other architectures like ARM, MIPS, PPC, etc. isolated in their own code segments, similar to how V86 mode works.
  • 20 years ago, IBM had their eCLipz initiative to unify z and POWER. What actually shipped was two different CPUs sharing some design, but some of the media reports on it made it sound like it may have originally been more ambitious-one CPU with two instruction sets.

    If that’s what it was, looks like they finally shipped it, just replacing POWER with ARM

  • Not explained in the article:

    Every single physical core on the chip decodes and executes both s390x and Arm AArch64 instructions, dynamically switching between the two ISA modes and convert them into micro ops. Mode switching is hypervisor-driven.

    And those chips are fast. 5.7 Ghz 2nm node.

    For who: When you need to run Linux programs on high security, mission critical environment. Others should not care.

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