IBM has introduced its new z16 mainframe, which includes an integrated on-chip AI accelerator, after teasing its z15 replacement earlier this year.
The new IBM z16, which has an on-chip AI accelerator, allows clients to analyze real-time transactions at scale for mission-critical workloads such as credit cards, healthcare, and financial transactions.
The IBM z16’s built-in Telum Processor enables AI inferencing, allowing banks to evaluate for fraud during transactions on a vast scale for the first time. The new mainframe can handle 300 billion inference queries each day with a latency of just one millisecond.
The IBM z16’s new capabilities open up new use cases for other industries, such as speeding up loan approval for both business and consumer loans, determining which trades or transactions have a high-risk exposure before settlement, and federated learning for retail to better model fraud and theft risk.
Ric Lewis, SVP of IBM Systems, elaborated in a news release on how organizations across industries can benefit from the IBM z16, saying:
“For extremely secure transaction processing, IBM is the gold standard. Our clients can now boost decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-important data resides thanks to IBM z16 technologies. This creates an enormous opportunity for them to change the game in their industries, allowing them to provide better consumer experiences and more significant commercial outcomes.”
In addition to AI inference, the new IBM z16 is the first quantum-safe system in the industry.
IBM built its new mainframe to be secure against both current and future cyber threats. One particularly troubling future threat is thieves’ use of quantum computing to steal data now to decrypt it later.
As a result, the IBM z16 is supported by lattice-based cryptography, which creates security primitives to secure data and systems from existing and future threats. Because of the device’s quantum-safe cryptography, organizations can future-proof their applications and data now rather than waiting till afterward.
Meanwhile, IBM’s secure boot feature protects the z16 from cybercriminals introducing malware into the boot process in an attempt to take control of the system at startup. At the same time, the device’s Crypto Express 8S (CEX8S) hardware security module offers clients both conventional and quantum-safe cryptography.
