IBM today announced the z13, described as one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. The z13 is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day - equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year. z13 transactions are protected and auditable from end-to-end, adding assurance as mobile transactions grow.

It is also the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale. The system includes 500 new patents including cryptographic encryption technologies that enable more security features for mobile initiated transactions.

In addition, embedded analytics provide real-time insights on all transactions.

"Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world's most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems.

IBM claims that the z13's microprocessor, is 2X faster than the most common server processors, it has 300 percent more memory and offers 100 percent more bandwidth and vector processing analytics to speed mobile transactions.

The z13 is available with up to 141 configurable processor units. With changes in the chip technology industry, microprocessor frequency is no longer the primary means to achieve performance. Hence, IBM says that the new 22nm 8-core processor chip achieves performance gains over IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12) by supporting increased instruction parallelism through wider instruction decode bandwidth, increased execution bandwidth and a more aggressive out-of-order-execution. Simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) executes two instruction streams (or threads) on a processor core, and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) - a vector processing model - provides instruction level parallelism to speed
workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. In addition, a redesigned cache architecture, leveraging eDRAM technology, provides twice as much second level cache and substantially more third and fourth level caches compared to the zEC12.

The z13 offers up to 10 TB of memory, it uses industry standard Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Generation 3 (PCIe) technology in the PCIe I/O drawer to support FICON, Crypto Express, OSA-Express, and our Flash Express solid state disk.

The z13 includes new support for Hadoop, enabling unstructured data to be analyzed in the system. Other analytics advances include faster acceleration of queries by adding DB2 BLU for Linux providing an in-memory database, enhancements to the IBM DB2 analytics accelerator, and improved performance for mathematically intense analytics workloads.

In a scale-out model, the system is capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers -- more than 50 virtual servers per core, accoding to IBM.

Additionally, the z13 is based on open standards, fully supporting Linux and OpenStack.

IBM will also unveil a preview of new z/OS software that delivers advanced analytic and data serving capabilities. When available, this new operating system will expand the ability of z13 to process in-memory analytics and provide analysis on mobile transactions.