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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Design of Design
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 05:24:58 -0000 (UTC)
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:

> They had the insight to see that the 16 fixed sizs registers could be
> in fast storage on high end machines, main memory on low end machines,
> so the high end machines were fast and the low end no slower than a
> memory-memory architecture which is what it in practice was. It was
> really an amazing design, no wonder it's the only architecture of its
> era that still has hardware implementations.

And they are making good money on it, too.

Prompted by a remark in another newsgroup, I looked at IBM's 2023
annual report, where zSystems is put under "Hybrid Infrastructure"
(lumped together with POWER).  The revenue for both lumped together
is around 9,215 billion Dollars, with a pre-tax margin of more
than 50%. 

At those margins, they can certainly pay for a development team
for future hardware generations.