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IBM Looking To Sell Its Semiconductor Business
jfruh writes "Having already gotten out of the low-end server market, IBM appears to be trying to get out of the chip business as well. The company currently manufactures Power Architecture chips for its own use and for other customers. Big Blue wants to sell off its manufacturing operations, but will continue to design its own chips."
I thought IBM was able to leverage their detailed knowledge of their semiconductor processes to squeeze every bit of performance they can out of their Power architecture designs, and even tweak the processes to aid them. I doubt they will have enough volume for another company to do much of that unless they are willing to pay.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Nobody buys Playboy for the articles. They do it for the hot, nude women (sadly, sans grits). It just so happens that /. is exactly the same. No one reads /. for the articles. The articles were news two days ago. And no one reads /. for the summaries. The summaries are almost always wrong.
Everyone reads /. for the comments. The comments are the /. equivalent of Playboy's naked chicks, with one crucial difference. Without the gentlemen at Playboy, there will be no naked chicks to look at. The service they provide is, for the most part, finding women that will agree to pose nude for pictures, which they most graciously distribute to their readers.
But as for Slashdot -- the good people at Dice and their "editorial" team do diddly squat around here to generate content. The articles, old as they may be, are submitted by the users. The summaries, mistaken as they may be, are provided by the users, not by Timothy, Soulskill, et al. The comments, trollish as they may be, are written by the users.
/. is of the users, by the users, for the users. The only people at Dice who deserve their paycheck are the IT people. The rest of you -- what is it that you do for our benefit? Why the hell do we need you clowns? Your music's bad and you should feel bad!
Beta delenda est!
I know of IBM as a:
- Desktop PC manufacturer
- Server manufacturer
- Chip manufacturer
If they don't have those 3 things any more, then what are they? To my knowledge, IBM has some of the best fabs in the world. It's amazing to me that this is not part of their core business. This is... wow... just wow.
Dice already said they need to redesign the beta. What more do you want from them, blood? So lay off with the immature "Waaaahhh...they aren't doing what I want them to."
Sad really, IBM once stood for innovation and industry leadership. Now they're all about maximizing shareholder equity and other buzzwords that have nothing to do with being a leader. The board needs to fire most of the C level MBA shit-for-brains and hire some tech talent from within to re-motivate the company before it's too late.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
How is semiconductors not a core business for a company that still makes huge profits off mainframes and midranges?? Sure, keep design in house, but you'll lose the flexibility you have. Imagine your research division came up with an amazing new chip design they wanted to work on right away, but were told "Nope, it'll take 6 months to ramp up GlobalFoundries, TSMC, or whatever. Sorry."
The thing I really don't get (in general) is the way businesses feel like they can have no assets on their books and just run everything with a massive tower of multi-layer outsourcing. It doesn't make sense -- outsourcing something is never cheaper than doing it yourself. As soon as you do that ,you add in a layer of middlemen who need to get paid for doing a task which was previously cheap or "free with purchase of inhouse labor." It never works out. I guess I'll never be an MBA, because I don't get the accounting tricks that make a company appear profitable when they're wasting money on things they could do cheaper and better themselves.
For IBM's case, I do see what they're trying to do. Software is more profitable than hardware. But the problem is that IBM is/was a huge innovator in hardware and chips. They're one of the last US companies massive enough to support basic research that can improve those hardware innovations. IBM's software may be profitable, but I haven't seen anyone singing the praises of WebSphere or their Rational products lately. IBM also has a massive "services" division. I've had extremely good luck with the services people who service IBM hardware, but that's going away. So, we're left with the legendary crap outsourcing and offshoring stuff they do for large companies, and of course, "consulting." My experience with outsourced IT run by IBM is an ITIL nightmare of endless support tickets, revolving door engineers, meetings to plan meetings to plan the strategy for changes, etc.
It's kind of a shame if you ask me. I am just old enough to remember when IBM was as powerful as Microsoft was and as Apple is right now. They were able to command huge margins on everything they sold because it was backed up by a really good services team. People I know who worked for IBM "back in the day" tell me the corporate culture was weird, but employees never wanted for anything because they made so much money. (I also know people who worked for Sun and Digital who say the same thing.) In some ways, it would have been much nicer to work in the computer field during this "golden age of computing." I guess my main question is where the new hardware innovations will come from when you don't have a massive company and research group driving them.
Manufacturing left America because China et al are cheaper
Completely off topic and completely wrong. Manufacturing is very strong in America to the tune of about $2 Trillion per year and for every dollar spend in US manufacturing it results in an additional $1.32 to the economy. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be one of the ten largest economies in the world - approximately the same size as the entire GDP of Russia even without considering the multiplier effects. The US presently has about 1/5 of global manufacturing activity. Some products are not manufactured in the US anymore (mostly high labor content low margin products) but any claim that "manufacturing left America" is completely false.
The only way you're bringing manufacturing back...
Manufacturing never left. If you think it did then you have no idea what you are talking about.
01 Apr 2014: IBM (NYSE:IBM) International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has changed back to it's original name, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and will be selling off all post 1930 technology units to focus on it's core business of dial recorders, electric tabulating machines and time clocks.
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posts are makes it annoying to read here in the last few days its gonna be quite nice to not see you here for 7 days.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Sell all your product lines in order to raise profits to the maximum?
IBM knew precisely what Hollerith was doing
Hollerith wasn't involved in that - he died in 1929. Otherwise you're spot on. Hollerith worked on punch cards and tabulating machines, and his stuff was used in the 1890 US census. The Hollerith code bore his name though, and that's what was tattooed on death camp prisoners.