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

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dekhn 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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").

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turtletontine 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Barrin92 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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smokefoot 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rbanffy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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macintux 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	Danox 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IBM at one time had nearly everything in modern tech under their roof like Xerox and squandered it. There is no comeback for them. They were the second American chip company that said no to Steve Jobs when hinted about designing smaller better chip mobile devices the other two were Motorola and Intel Apple had to eventually do it themselves. Apple Silicon

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AlexCoventry 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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girvo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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