They are tailored to the traditional mainframe workloads (they do a lot of hardware/software co-design in their mainframe lineup), so I wouldn't expect a mainframe designed for the generic cloud hyperscale workloads.

In any case, I have played with their LinuxONE Community Cloud service (running on the previous-gen z15) and it's very fast. The impression I get is that it doesn't need to wait for IO. There is a ton of very clever engineering on those machines and the z16 is a technological wonder.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-preview-th...