Prior to the IBM z10, applications achieved significant performance improvements from hardware upgrades, but as processing power has increased through new hardware features, such as new instruction sets, applications compiled with Enterprise COBOL v.4 and all earlier compilers are unable to exploit these new facilities and are not running efficiently on modern Z systems. To take advantage of these new instructions and improve performance, IBM Z customers need to recompile their COBOL programs with Enterprise COBOL v6 (see video below for added context). The IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer (ABO), first introduced in 2015, can be used to improve the performance of already compiled COBOL programs without requiring source code recompilation, source code migration, or performance options tuning.
Read more