IBM Telum

Telum

General information
Launched	2021
Designed by	IBM
Common manufacturer	Samsung Electronics
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

Telum is a microprocessor made by IBM for the IBM z16 series mainframe computers. The processor was announced at the Hot Chips 2021 conference on 23 August 2021. Telum is IBM's first processor that contains on-chip acceleration for artificial intelligence inferencing while a transaction is taking place.

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. The cache design has been described as "revolutionary" in 2021, by creating a system where the L2 cache of one core can be used as virtual L3 and L4 caches for another core. 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. Unlike other processors, the IBM Telum does not thermal throttle by reducing clock speed; instead it inserts sleep state instructions.

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

See also

• z/Architecture
• IBM Z
• Mainframe computer