IBM Unveils Dual-ISA Processor with Native Arm Support

IBM has unveiled a new processor design capable of natively executing both Arm's AArch64 and IBM's z/Architecture on each core. The company announced this design at Hot Chips 2026, where they showcased a processor running 11 high-performance cores at over 5.7GHz, built using a 2nm process node.

The new design extends all 11 cores to support both instruction sets, unlike previous designs that added a separate Arm-only core. This allows for simultaneous execution of Arm-native Linux virtual machines and z/OS or Linux-on-IBM-Z environments within the same system.

According to IBM, they have integrated AArch64 v9.3 in hardware, supporting 2,792 instructions including SVE. The instruction decoder was modified to support AArch64, while sharing branch predictors and data paths from previous designs.