IBM has announced its next-generation Telum II processor with a built-in AI accelerator for next-generation IBM Z mainframes that can handle both mission-critical tasks and AI workloads. The new processor can potentially improve performance "by up to 70% across key system components," compared to the original Telum, released in 2021, according to an email we received from IBM.
The Telum II processor packs eight high-performance cores with improved branch prediction, store writeback, and address translation operating at 5.5GHz as well as 36MB of L2 cache, a 40% increase over its predecessor. The CPU also supports virtual L3 and L4 caches expanding to 360MB and 2.88GB, respectively. A key feature of Telum II is its improved AI accelerator, which delivers four times the computational power of its predecessor, reaching 24 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with INT8 precision. The accelerator's architecture is optimized for handling AI workloads in real time with low latency. In addition, Telum II has a built-in DPU for faster transaction processing. Telum II is made on Samsung's 5HPP process technology and contains 43 billion transistors.
