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Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

IBM

IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?

I am still amazed that IBM is pushing their POWER processors forwards for things like their System Z Mainframes. From what I have heard they are still really fast with I/O and general shifting of data but I'm not sure how much better than is than the alternatives.

Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.

POWER still exists? That's kind of neat. I had a POWER 1 rs6k way back. Almost wish I'd had room to keep it just as a sort of museum piece. The processor was several chips on one or two large PCBs IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER1 IRC.

I know, they are up to the POWER 11 spec now. It is the definition of a brilliant architecture that was simply out run by others (x86) that could push their mediocre setups far better than they could.

I thought GlobalFoundries was AMD's fab division spun off.

Precisely. IBM paid them to take their fabs away (yes, they paid them, not the opposite, they were so obsolete that it was basically a waste disposal operation)

was there some regulation preventing them from just shutting the plants down and selling off the real estate and equipment? severance payments too high?

IIRC they had an agreement that Globalfoundries were to take the fabs and further develop them to shrink to better nodes. I think it was less than a "take this crap off of us" and more of a "we still need fabs, so here's some money and please continue running them for a while". GloFo then utterly failed at competing with TSMC, Samsung and Intel which was quite a problem for IBM. In general if you have a certain design you can't immediately port it to a different fab, you need to engineer it around the constraints of the fab node and process

Yes, more specifically IBM -> AMD -> spin off.

They are mainly in services now, no?

In 2021, the majority of IBM's "Global Technology Services" was spun-off as an independent company named Kyndryl.

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