IBM, AMD announce joint development agreement to advance

IBM and AMD on Thursday announced a multi-year joint development agreement to enhance and extend the security and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings of both companies.

IBM and AMD on Thursday announced a multi-year joint development agreement to enhance and extend the security and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings of both companies. The joint development agreement would expand this vision by building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures to drive' Confidential Computing' in hybrid cloud environments, according to an IBM statement.

It would also support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing (HPC), and enterprise-critical capabilities such as virtualisation and encryption. "The commitment of AMD to technological innovation aligns with our mission to develop and accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud to help connect, secure and power our digital world," said Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research.

Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and CTO, AMD, was quoted as saying: "AMD is excited to extend our work with IBM on AI, accelerating data center workloads, and improving security across the cloud." Confidential Computing is a technology, enabled by hardware, that allows the data associated with a running virtual machine (VM) to be encrypted, including while workloads are running. This capability helps prevent would-be attackers and bad actors from accessing confidential information, even in the event of a break-in, it was noted.

Confidential Computing for hybrid cloud unlocks new potential for enterprise adoption of hybrid cloud computing, especially in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and insurance, the statement added.