alt Hacker NewsI was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
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To be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.
The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.
I was one of them, but I don't think IBM hasn't innovated, my contention is more that they have de-emphasised software and hardware in favour of services, and they've moved away from consumer-facing activity to be entirely B2B, and that there is an overall feeling of slow decline.
Their hardware advances are real, Power chips are still excellent and IBM's mainframes are pretty unique, but the niche for both of those seems less relevant over time and some of this stuff looks to me like hype-work to keep the name relevant while the leadership place ever more emphasis on enterprise services and consultancy.
Maybe I'm wrong, but they aren't a company that get mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft, Google, Nvidia or Apple, not any more.
There are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.
Those takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation.
There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).