Technical Overview

The 2964 is the IBM z13. New market forces are changing the face of every industry, requiring almost every business to transform. Successful leaders see possibilities by embracing digital business. This means supporting existing clients with new services and offerings, while providing an environment that helps previously underserved businesses and citizens to gain access to products, services, and societal benefits. A successful journey through your transformation requires an underlying IT infrastructure that is efficient, secure, adaptive, and integrated. This IT infrastructure must be designed to handle the explosive growth of increasingly mobile clients and employees, able to leverage new and vast amounts of data, and able to provide deeper real-time insight at the point of the greatest business impact, and it needs to do this with a secure and resilient cloud-ready infrastructure.

Also, IBM System z has been renamed to IBM z Systems. This new name will encompass every IBM Mainframe from S/360 through the new z13, and all future systems. The name change serves to signal evolution of the product line, positioning of expanding capabilities, and the role of the mainframe in the new digital era of IT.

The IBM z13 provides the infrastructure that will help differentiate you as a refined digital business. It offers the capacity and processing power to improve business performance and growth. It helps better protect sensitive transactions to minimize business risk and client exposure, and it helps to deliver on service level agreements for an exceptional customer experience. New economic efficiencies allow the IBM z13 to offer more throughput and capabilities with less impact to the IT budget.

z/OS V2.1 running on IBM z13 sets the groundwork for digital business by providing the foundation you need to support demanding workloads such as operational analytics and clouds alongside your traditional mission-critical applications. z/OS V2.1 continues to support the z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) which can take advantage of simultaneous multithreading. z/OS V2.1 is designed to support the new vector extension facility (SIMD) instructions available on IBM z13 servers to provide a powerful framework for development of new Business Analytics workloads, porting math- intensive workloads from other platforms, and accelerating Business Analytics workloads on IBM z13.

z/OS features many I/O-related enhancements such as extending the reach of workload management into the SAN fabric. With enhancements to management and operations, z/OS V2.1 and z/OS Management Facility V2.1 can help systems administrators and other personnel handle configuration tasks with ease. Recent Mobile Workload Pricing for z/OS can help reduce the cost of growth for mobile transactions processed by programs such as IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS, IMS, and DB2 for z/OS.

The new 141-core design delivers massive scale across all workloads and enables cost-saving consolidation opportunities. z/VM V6.3 has been enhanced to exploit simultaneous multithreading offered on the new processor chip. When running on IBM z13, z/VM supports twice as many processors (up to 64) or as many as 64 threads for Linux workloads. With support for sharing OSA-Express Port Groups across z/VM systems within a central processor complex (CPC), z/VM V6.3 delivers increased optimization of OSA-Express and reduced cost of ownership for IEEE 802.3 Link Aggregation networking environments.

The IBM z13 brings a new approach for enterprise-grade Linux with offerings and capabilities for availability, virtualization with z/VM, and a focus on open standards and architecture with new support of KVM on the mainframe (see Statement of General Direction). Best of all, many of our clients have IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12) and IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196) servers, which can be upgraded to the IBM z13 for the greatest levels of investment protection.

This extends IBM z Systems leadership with:

• Up to 40% more total system capacity compared to the zEC12
• Up to 10 terabytes (TB) of available Redundant Array of Independent Memory (RAIM) real memory per server
• Cryptographic performance improvements with new Crypto Express5S
• Economies of scale with simultaneous multithreading delivering more throughput for Linux and zIIP-eligible workloads
• Improved performance of complex mathematical models, perfect for analytics processing, with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD)
• IBM zAware cutting-edge pattern recognition analytics for fast insight into system health extended to Linux on z Systems
• A reduction in elapsed time for I/O-bound batch jobs with new FICON Express16S versus FICON Express8S
• Support for larger memory configurations planned to be supported on z/OS systems, which can be used to improve transaction response times, lower CPU costs, simplify capacity planning and ease deploying memory-intensive workloads (The IBM z13 offers up to 10 TB memory.)
• I/O service time improvement when writing data remotely using the new zHPF Extended Distance II
• Support for up to 256 coupling CHPIDs, which provides enhanced connectivity and scalability for a growing number of coupling channel types
• IBM Integrated Coupling Adapter (ICA SR), which offers greater short reach coupling connectivity than existing link technologies and enables greater overall coupling connectivity per IBM z13 than prior server generations
• Capability to extend z/OS workload management policies into the SAN fabric
• New rack-mounted Hardware Management Console (HMC), helping to save space in the data center
• Nonraised floor option, offering flexible possibilities for the data center
• Optional water cooling, providing the ability to cool systems with user-chilled water
• Optional high-voltage dc power, which can help IBM z Systems clients save on their power bills
• Optional top exit power and I/O cabling designed to provide increased flexibility
• New IBM z BladeCenter Extension (zBX) Model 004 in support of heterogeneous resources managed by IBM z Unified Resource Manager

z13 8-Core Chip Details

The z13 PU chip (installed as a PU SCM) is an evolution of the zEC12 core design. It uses CMOS 14S0 technology, out-of-order instruction processing, pipeline enhancements, dynamic simultaneous multithreading (SMT), single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD), and redesigned and larger caches.

Each PU chip has up to eight cores that run at 5.0 GHz, which means that the cycle time is 0.2 ns. The PU chips come in three versions: Six, seven, and eight active cores. For models N30, N63, N96, and NC9, the processor units in each drawer are implemented with 39 active cores per drawer. This configuration means that model N30 has 39, model N63 has 78, model N96 has 117, and model NC9 has 156 active cores.

Up to eight active cores (PUs) per chip

• 5.0 GHz (v5.5 GHz zEC12)
• L1 cache/core
  • 96KB I-cache
  • 128KB D-cache
• L2 cache/core
  • 2M+2M Byte eDRAM split private L2 cache

Chip Area

• 678.8mm²
• 28.4 x 23.9 mm
• 17,773 power pins
• 1,603 signal I/Os

Inside the IBM Z13 2964