IBM Unveils Next-Gen System with Integrated On-chip AI Accelerator

IBM has unveiled IBM z16, IBM’s next-generation system with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator—delivering latency-optimized inferencing. 

This innovation is designed to enable clients to analyze real-time transactions, at scale -- for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions. Building on IBM’s history of security leadership, IBM z16 also is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today’s encryption technologies.

Real-time enterprise AI to revolutionize industries with new use cases and applications

Financial institutions worldwide struggle with the impacts of fraudulent activities on their revenues and consumer interactions. IBM z16 uniquely brings together AI inferencing, via its IBM Telum Processor, with the highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing IBM is known for.

For the first time, banks can analyse for fraud during transactions on a massive scale: IBM z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one millisecond of latency. For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card. For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid frustration associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions.

Other threats including tax fraud and organized retail theft are emerging as challenges for governments and businesses to control. Real-time payments and alternative payment methods like cryptocurrencies are pushing the limits on traditional fraud detection techniques. 

As the industry’s first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is underpinned by lattice-based cryptography, an approach for constructing security primitives that helps protect data and systems against current and future threats. With IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can future-ready their applications and data today.

IBM z16’s secure boot ( meaning that bad actors cannot inject malware into the boot process to take over the system during startup) and quantum-safe cryptography can help clients address future quantum-computing related threats including harvest now, decrypt later attacks which can lead to extortion, loss of intellectual property and disclosure of other sensitive data.

With IBM z16, IBM used a highly collaborative, client-centered approach that deeply engaged hundreds of individuals from more than 70 clients, a practice that is already underway for future IBM mainframe systems. IBM z16 will be generally available on May 31, 2022. For more information, please visit Ross Mauri’s blog.