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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

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andrewstuart·

IBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days?

For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”.

But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability.

They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?

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IBM still sells extremely POWERful systems, but they don't seem particularly interested in expanding the market.

I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.

They also charge you for every instruction cycle on the machines (look up MIPS licensing) you own. Imagine if NVIDIA started doing that with their GPUs: spend $2500 on a GPU and then pay NVIDIA a royalty fee for every hour of workload you put on it.

Two different product lines. POWER systems are sold by the socket, on the higher end sometimes you get some license disabled cores but it's usually trivial. Mainframes are the opposite, you usually get the full monty machine that is extremely limited by licensing.

they've also still got their storage stuff. I always wondered why that isn't doing better, it seemed pretty damn good when I've ended up working iwth it.

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