Though us PC gamers are unlikely to get the benefit of it, sometimes some new bit of PC hardware comes out of the enterprise market that just makes you go 'huh, that's neat'. Today, it's a new chip from IBM made in collaboration with Arm that runs architectures from both companies on a single chip. That means it will be able to run Arm-based Linux environments as well as IBM's z/OS, and the software that comes with both.

Prior to this, running multiple sets of instructions would require emulating the right instructions, ie, turning instructions from one architecture to another that can actually be processed by the cores. Though we won't know how well it runs in use until the chip actually launches, it's still an interesting bit of tech that could be more versatile long-term.

Combining two different architectures in one chip is very uncommon, though not unprecedented. The Register spoke to tech analyst George Cozma, and he explained: "Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot… The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly."

Arm says it is built for "the next era of enterprise infrastructure", and that includes, as one might expect, cloud and AI infrastructure. Its current chips are reportedly used by over 22 million developers worldwide, including businesses like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google.

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