I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
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.
To be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation.<p>There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU.<p>PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.<p>PS4 moved to AMD.
Having a presence in the consumer market is not a requirement for being innovative.<p>IBM stopped building servers based on x86 because the margins were too thin for their tastes, but they never stopped building on top of POWER and Z.
There are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.
well that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff.<p><a href="https://research.ibm.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://research.ibm.com/blog</a>
Those takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.