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Home News IBM Expands z17 and LinuxONE 5 Mainframe Lineups With Single Frame and...
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In this age of agentic AI and Arm servers you would not think it, but IBM just had its best year in the last two decades for mainframe sales. Benefitting from a surge in demand and a new hardware platform for IBM’s mainframe lineup – the z17 series and its Telum II processor – 2025 was one of the best years ever for mainframe systems on this side of the millennial divide.
Coming off of that record momentum, IBM is taking the next step in the release of the z17 series and associated fifth-generation LinuxONE systems with a new set of smaller-scale hardware for their respective families. After launching their big iron multi-rack systems in 2025, for the summer of 2026 IBM is preparing to release single-frame mainframes and even rack mount offerings to complete the z17 and LinuxONE lineups. These smaller systems will be aimed at customers who are after the features of IBM’s mainframes but do not need quite as much performance as the multi-rack systems offer.
And in an interesting move, IBM is even going one step beyond by releasing a standalone rack mount box, the LinuxONE Express, to serve as a gateway for onboarding new customers and growing their mainframe user base.
z17 & LinuxONE 5: Built from Telum II & Spyre Processors
Both of these new mainframe collections are fundamentally a smaller collection of hardware based on IBM’s existing z17 platform. Launched last year, the z17 platform is based around IBM’s Telum II processor, which is an 8-core chip built on Samsung’s 5HPP process. With hardware compatibility for programs going back to IBM’s original sixty-year-old System/360 platform, Telum II is a chip like no other.
IBM Z17 Telum II DCM In Hand Z Light Background 3<br>Our own Patrick Kennedy had a chance to go hands-on with the chip last year when IBM first launched the z17 series. At 600mm2, Telum II puts the “big” in “big iron,” as IBM built a chip that approaches the limits of Samsung’s 5nm process node while still pulling off a 5.5GHz clockspeed. At only 8 cores, the Telum II chip is not particularly dense in comparison to modern x86 and Arm chips, so besides its high single-core performance, IBM is primarily relying on scaling it out in larger clusters of up to 32 chips to get to higher core counts.
In a sign of the times, one of the big features of the z17 series (and fifth-generation LinuxONE) was AI processing, which saw IBM introduce a contemporary, 24 TOPS AI accelerator block for CPU-based inference.
IBM Spyre AI Accelerator PCIe Card 2<br>And if that was not enough AI performance for IBM’s mainframe user base, the alongside the Telum II CPU IBM also gave the chip a dedicated AI accelerator, the Spyre. The PCIe card houses what is essentially a larger version of the AI accelerator block from Telum II, allowing it to be used similarly to the on-CPU accelerator block, but with higher performance from being its own dedicated chip.
IBM Z17 Plexiglass With Patrick 1<br>Thanks in big part to Telum II and Spyre, in their...