Mr Joy says that his new design, which turns a single chip into a parallel-processing system, can handle huge amounts of video and audio data at speeds that would overwhelm the usual Intel chip.

ECONOMIST: Strength through Joy | The

"The new IBM zEnterprise System represents a potentially revolutionary change to the platform and the next phase in the evolution of highly efficient, scalable processing opening up the possibility of hosting entire workloads on a single highly integrated system, " said Martin Kennedy, Managing Director, Citi's Enterprise System Infrastructure.

ENGADGET: IBM's zEnterprise architecture makes mainframes cool again, also efficient (video)