IBM's Upcoming Z Series Chip Gains On-Chip AI Acceleration and New Name: Telum

In a major refresh of its Z Series chips, IBM is adding on-chip AI acceleration capabilities to allow enterprise customers to perform deep learning inferencing while transactions are taking place to capture business insights and fight fraud in real-time. IBM is set to unveil the latest Z chip Aug. 23 today (Monday) at the annual Hot Chips 33 conference, which is being held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The company provided advance details in a media pre-briefing last week. This will be the first Z chip, used in IBM's System Z mainframes, that won't follow a traditional numeric naming pattern used in the past. Instead of following the previous z15 chip with a z16 moniker, the new processor is being called IBM Telum (telum is Latin for javelin).