Comment by alexey-salmin
1 day ago
The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now
1 day ago
The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now
Most of their fabs were divested to GlobalFoundries, but they still have pretty significant fab capability and capacity- I suspect at least partly to have a us-based chip-making for military ("Trusted Foundry").
The labs might not be that different from consulting, the NYT reporting on this notes they run R&D labs so they can license the tech they develop to people who actually make chips.
IBM has been the company with the most patent registrations in the US for I think 29 of the last 30 years. They're one of the largest industrial research organizations in the world. They're doing more hard science research than almost anyone else.
Which is so weird, right? Like what is IBM now and how does a research lab make sense with the rest of their business?
The money-making parts of IBM are: legacy software and hardware (declining), consulting (low margin, low leverage), enterprise software (mostly redhat, not really growing). It's hard to explain how IBM research is accretive to any of that.
Licensing is a substantial source of revenue, and their servers have very impressive (think Telum’s caching) innovations, even though they rely on third-parties for manufacturing the chips themselves.
They are also betting on quantum computing to become commercially relevant.
The hardware division has 80%+ margin and still makes the systems that process 75% of all financial transactions. Their processors for those systems are on par or better than any other, I don’t think that is a business at all. This cash cow is not going away any time soon and gives them the profits to make bets on the future of computing.
I don't know enough about their business to say, but I'm thrilled at even the idea that someone might actually value long-term success over quarterly earnings.
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Isn't consulting one of the most high-margin areas in general?
It's just a shame that none of it seems to pan out, and in the areas where I know what they're talking about, it all sounds like cynical nonsense to me.
I really wish I had followed through when I was ask by some of the guys at IBM Research to apply when we had worked together on a partner project. Though I didn’t have a degree which I seem to remember was a sticking point, this is in the mid 2010s