IBM AIU Chip Family
IBM Research's family of purpose-built AI accelerator chips, the research lineage feeding IBM's production AI silicon strategy across mainframe, Power, and cloud.
IBM Research's AIU (Artificial Intelligence Unit) chip family is the research and development lineage behind IBM's production AI acceleration silicon. Rather than a single commercial product, AIU represents IBM Research's ongoing work on chip architectures purpose-built for AI inference and training efficiency.
For anyone watching the road to Power12, AIU research disclosures are worth tracking precisely because IBM's production chips -- Telum II's on-chip accelerator, the Spyre Accelerator card -- draw on ideas proven out in the AIU research line first. It is upstream of the roadmap, not itself a roadmap commitment.
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IBM Telum II Processor
IBM's mainframe-class processor with a native, on-chip AI accelerator delivering 24 trillion operations per second -- four times the AI throughput of the original Telum chip.
IBM Spyre Accelerator
IBM's PCIe-based AI accelerator card, built for on-premises generative and traditional AI inference, with confirmed Power11 compatibility arriving December 2025.
Open Memory Interface (OMI)
IBM's proprietary memory interconnect, replacing direct DDR signaling with a high-speed serial protocol that already powers Power10 and Power11's DDR5 DDIMM memory.
OpenPOWER Foundation
The IBM-founded, now community-governed foundation that opened the Power ISA to royalty-free licensing, and the institutional structure that any Power12 architecture change has to work within.