I worked at ibm research last century. They spent 6 billion on research. They had a chip fab in the building and still were making chips at the time. They had a wide range of researchers (mathematicians, physicists , software). working on all sorts of stuff (very motivated). Lots of cooling gasses.

The problem was trying to turn those inventions into something they could sell. Chip tech was sold to whoever they could.

They don't need to make money selling chips if they can license their IP to people who run the foundries. IBM's prodigious patent portfolio is a huge revenue source for the company.

I wonder what is percentage? Is it still a mainframe shop? Last time I heard abd it failed is to become a consultancy firm with Pwc. What is ibm now?

IBM just spun out a $19B annual revenue managed infrastructure business, Kyndryl. [1]

Doing some back of the napkin math on the remaining business, by revenue it is roughly 45% consulting, 40% software, and 15% hardware. IP revenue represents 1% ($626M) of its revenue. [2]

What does it actually do? At a high level, help companies deal with the complexities created in a world of heterogeneous infrastructure (data and AI across environments, common management/security, automation, etc.).

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/04/kyndryl-officially-launche...

[2] https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM_Annual_Report_2020....

Disclaimer: I'm an IBM employee, but my opinions are my own and I'm just using public data.

I don't know the numbers, but I do know they still do significant work in mainframes. They're even still designing their own Power processors for them.

Just a point of clarification, POWER and z (mainframe) are different architectures, both of which IBM still develops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

Ah, ok. I didn't know if the IBM relationship with Samsung was exclusive. Sounds like no.