The upcoming model of the IBM z Systems line of mainframe computers will provide several extensions to the instruction set. Most importantly this model will have support for single and extended precision floating point values in the vector unit. In this talk I'll give an overview of the architecture changes in the new machine model, in particular the vector instruction set extensions. I'll also describe how the language extensions will be enhanced to support the new features. Finally, I'll report on where we stand in implementing those new features in the GNU toolchain, and address a couple of challenges that still need to be resolved.