Hi Telum

Last week IBM unveiled details of its upcoming new IBM Telum processor, the next-gen-microprocessor for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.

IBM Telum Processor was designed to bring deep learning inference to enterprise workloads. It’s mission: address fraud in real-time. To do that Telum is IBM’s first processor that contains on-chip acceleration for AI inferencing while a transaction is taking place. In short, you could catch a bad guy doing a bad thing while it is taking place. Of course you would need to put the people and processes in place to respond effectively and have them properly trained, but that is probably an entirely different conversation.

In short, you could catch a bad guy doing a bad thing while it is taking place. If you had trained people in place.Of course, you would need to put trained people and processes in place to respond effectively and have them properly trained.

The breakthrough of this new on-chip hardware acceleration is intended to help customers achieve business insights at scale across banking, finance, trading, insurance applications and customer interactions. Don’t expect a Telum-based system tomorrow. Rather, IBM suggests it is planned for the first half of 2022.

IBM is touting the Telum processor as the next-gen microprocessor for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, both Z-based systems. As IBM puts it: Telum is the company’s first processor that contains on-chip acceleration for AI inferencing while a transaction is taking place. Three years in development, the breakthrough of this new on-chip hardware acceleration is intended to help customers achieve business insights at scale key industries and do it in what amounts to near real time.

Somehow, DancingDinosaur is not convinced most businesses are prepared to go that far that fast. You can imagine any number of complications arising starting with litigation.

Telum is the first IBM chip with a processor and technology created by the IBM Research AI Hardware Center. In addition, Samsung is IBM’s technology development partner for the Telum processor, developed in 7nm EUV technology node.

A little more from IBM on Telum specifics: The microprocessor contains 8 processor cores, clocked at over 5GHz, with each core supported by a redesigned 32MB private level-2 cache. The level-2 caches interact to form a 256MB virtual Level-3 and 2GB Level-4 cache.

Along with improvements to the processor core itself, the 1.5x growth of cache per core over the z15 generation is designed to enable a significant increase in both per-thread performance and total capacity IBM can deliver in the next generation IBM Z system. Telum’s performance improvements are vital for rapid response times in complex transaction systems, especially when augmented with real time AI inference.

Telum also features significant innovation in security, with transparent encryption of main memory. Telum’s Secure Execution improvements are designed to provide increased performance and usability for Hyper Protected Virtual Servers and trusted execution environments, making Telum an optimal choice for processing sensitive data in Hybrid Cloud architectures, a big IBM marketing target.

IBM’s standard  boilerplate: Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghostwriter. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at http://www.technologywriter.com