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From: "Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Design of Design
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:06:49 -0000 (UTC)
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Thomas Koenig wrote:

> 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.


Yes, although it isn't clear how much of its success is due to
technical superiority versus marketing superiority.



> 
> 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.



Yes, but remember that includes softwre revenue, which has higher
margins than hardware revenue.  I believe I saw somewhere that IBM made
more from MVS, DB2, CICS, etc. than they do on the hardware itself.  So
one could argue that they have to develop mew hardware in order to
protect their software revenue!




-- 
 - Stephen Fuld 
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)