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IBM Looking To Sell Its Semiconductor Business

Posted by Soulskill on from the offloading-all-the-hardware dept.

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."

5 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's left? by Third+Position · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kind of like watching fingers fall off of a leper, isn't it?

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  2. Re:Slashcott - don't visit this site from 2/10 - 2 by gtall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

  3. that's what I was thinking too. by Virtucon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  4. Re:That's a surprise move by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have they recently acquired new executives that are hellbent on selling absolutely everything that isn't mainframes and $$$$$/hour consultants?

    Yes, their previous CEO made a stupid goal of $20 operating EPS by 2015 and the new CEO seems to be hell bent on hitting that target, whether that's from an incentive program or ego talking I'm not sure.

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  5. Re:That's a surprise move by unixisc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is sad. I remember when IBM came out w/ some great innovations like the copper process. It's also disappointing to see even fewer, rather than more fabs. Yeah, I know that the costs are astronomical, but converting such a market into an Intel monopoly is a cause for concern

    Also, once that's gone, it will be the end of the road for Power as well: as it is, Freescale has all but abandoned it, the console guys have abandoned it and now it's IBM itself. An independent fab won't free up space for IBM's Power if there are more lucrative chips available - particularly in volume. Only reason SPARC is alive is really Fujitsu, and Itanic is almost dead. Power being gone would leave only MIPS for the embedded space, and Xeon/Opteron for the server space. I doubt that ARM8 will have a significant role there.