IBM has introduced the Spyre AI accelerator chip, a new enterprise-grade product designed to enhance AI capabilities in IBM Z systems. The Spyre accelerator was previewed at the Hot Chips 2024 Palo Alto, California, conference.

The Spyre accelerator is a system-on-a-chip with 32 individual accelerator cores, 25.6 billion transistors, and 14 miles of wire. It is produced using 5 nm node process technology and mounted on a PCIe card. Cards can be clustered, with a cluster of eight cards adding 256 additional accelerator cores to a single IBM Z system. The chip has been designed to send data directly from one compute engine to the next, which saves energy.

IBM claims that the Spyre accelerator will allow future IBM Z systems to perform AI inferencing at a greater scale than currently available. Spyre provides the ability to run products such as watsonx code assistant to increase the efficiency of code-based mainframes. It is designed to bring modern AI workloads to mainframes, enabling GenAI and model fine-tuning on-premises while maintaining the security and reliability of IBM Z systems.

Analyst QuickTake: IBM has been focused on bolstering its watsonx Code Assistant (launched in October 202 3), which offers natural language prompts to assist with tasks, such as network configuration and code deployment in IT automation.