IBM Telum

Telum is a microprocessor made by IBM for the IBM z16 series mainframe computers.^[2][3] The processor was announced at the Hot Chips 2021 conference on 23 August 2021.^[2] Telum is IBM's first processor that contains on-chip acceleration for artificial intelligence inferencing while a transaction is taking place.^{[clarification needed][4][5]}

Telum

General information
Launched	2021
Designed by	IBM
Common manufacturer	Samsung Electronics[1]
Performance
Max. CPU clock rate	5.2 GHz
Cache
L2 cache	32 MB per core
Architecture and classification
Technology node	7 nm
Instruction set	z/Architecture
Physical specifications
Cores	8
History
Predecessor	z15
Successor	Telum II

Both sides of the Telum microprocessor

Description

The chip contains 8 processor cores with a deep superscalar out-of-order pipeline, running with more than 5 GHz clock frequency which is optimized for the demands of heterogenous enterprise-class workloads (e.g: finance, security sensitive applications, applications requiring extreme reliability). The cache and chip-interconnection infrastructure provides 32 MB cache per core and can scale to 32 Telum chips.^[6][3][7] The cache design has been described as "revolutionary" in 2021, ^[6] by creating a system where the L2 cache of one core can be used as virtual L3 and L4 caches for another core.^[3][1] The Telum processor can either be water cooled or air cooled, but water cooling is required for running more than a few Telum processors in a single IBM compute drawer.^[8][9] Unlike other processors, the IBM Telum does not thermal throttle by reducing clock speed; instead it inserts sleep state instructions.^[8][9]

Telum adds a new, NNP-Data-Type-1 Format, 16-bit floating point format and several new instructions. The Neural Network Processing Assists (NNPA)^[10] instruction performs a variety of tensor instructions useful for neural networks.

See also

• z/Architecture
• IBM Z
• Mainframe computer