Citigroup managing director for enterprise systems infrastructure Martin Kennedy told Information Week he believes that IBM's new water-cooled IBMz 196 mainframe, which it took ownership of recently, is "the highest-performing mainframe ever made".

Citigroup is expecting to see massive returns on its investment in the mainframe, which contains the four-core z196 processor running at 5.2GHz which IBM says helps power what it has labelled as the most "power mainframe" it has created yet.

It told Information Week it is hoping it will help lover its IT costs, improve its data quality and disaster recovery while providing opportunities for consolidation in its systems, allowing it to move multiple large systems to the IBM mainframe. 

"With this first machine that we've brought in-house, we'll be running many of our core applications on it and looking closely at reliability characteristics, which have always been a strength of mainframes," Kennedy told Information Week on Wednesday. "For our customers, we think this will lead to our ability to deliver a very highly reliable and innovative package of core banking applications in a very efficient way."

Kennedy said he believes the mainframe is "an architectural change of significant magnitude that has the potential to completely change the IT landscape."

The z196 processor, based on IBM's 45 nanometer SOI process technology, contains 1.4 billion transistors on a surface that is only 512-square millimetres. It will start shipping later this month.