IBM's big iron to get Spyre AI accelerator upgrade this month

IBM's Spyre Accelerator is set to be generally available later this month, delivering a boost to the AI capabilities of its enterprise-grade hardware including the z17 mainframe, LinuxONE 5, and Power11 systems.

Spyre, described by Big Blue as an accelerator purpose-built to handle the demands of AI processing, will be generally available from October 28 for IBM z17 and LinuxONE 5 systems, and in early December for Power11 servers.

The hardware was announced earlier this year alongside the z17, IBM's latest mainframe incarnation. It is a PCIe card based on a custom chip with 32 individual accelerator cores, understood to be a similar architecture to the AI accelerator hardware embedded in the Telum II processors that power the z17.

Its intended purpose is to allow AI processing to scale to meet whatever requirements the customer may have for one of IBM's enterprise systems, which ...