Two architectures on one chip: Arm and IBM team up in a legendary crossover, but alas it’s for ‘enterprise infrastructure’

Though us PC gamers are unlikely to get the benefit of it, sometimes some new bit of PC hardware comes out of the enterprise market that just makes you go ‘huh, that’s neat’. Today, it’s a new chip from IBM made in collaboration with Arm that runs architectures from both companies on a single chip. That means it will be able to run Arm-based Linux environments as well as IBM’s z/OS, and the software that comes with both.

Prior to this, running multiple sets of instructions would require emulating the right instructions, ie, turning instructions from one architecture to another that can actually be processed by the cores. Though we won’t know how well it runs in use until the chip actually launches, it’s still an interesting bit of tech that could be more versatile long-term.