[1] IBM stated that it is the world's fastest microprocessor and is about 10% faster than its predecessor the zEC12 in general single-threaded computing,[3] but significantly more when doing specialized tasks.
[3][6] The PU chip can have six, seven or eight cores (or "processor units" in IBM's parlance) enabled depending on configuration.
It has facilities related to transactional memory, and new features such as two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT), 139 new SIMD instructions, data compression, improved cryptography and logical partitioning.
The cores have numerous other enhancements such as a new superscalar pipeline, on-chip cache design and error correction.
The z13 also includes two GX bus as well as two new Gen 3 PCIe controllers for accessing host channel adapters and peripherals.