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, capable of achieving higher than 5 GHz clock frequency. The cache and chip-interconnection infrastructure provides 32 MB cache per core and can scale to 32 Telum chips. The cache design allows 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. Uniquely, the IBM Telum does not thermal throttle by reducing clock speed; instead it inserts sleep state instructions.
Telum adds a new 16-bit floating point format (NNP-Data-Type-1 Format) and several new instructions."The fourteenth edition of this publication differs from the previous edition principally by containing the definitions of the following facilities: BEAR-enhancement facility Enhanced-sort facility Mapped-I/O-addressing facility [PCI ONLY] Neural-network-processing-assist facility Processor-activity-instrumentation facility Processor-activity-instrumentation extension 1 Reset-DAT-protection facility Storage-key-removal facility Vector-packed-decimal-enhancement facility" The Neural Network Processing Assists (NNPA) instruction performs a variety of tensor instructions useful for neural networks.
Telum II adds new functions to NNPA.
See also z/Architecture IBM Z Mainframe computer
Manuals z-14
z-15
Notes
References