Question What's going on with Power?

[NTMBK]

Semiaccurate have a paywalled story up about Power: https://www.semiaccurate.com/2020/06/03/is-ibm-killing-off-power/ Apparently something big is happening, though it's definitely not being killed. Anyone got any ideas what it might be? Random thoughts that occur to me are

• They could be selling the business
• They could be switching fab (ditching Samsung/GloFo and going to TSMC or Intel)
• They could be changing business model (leaning more into OpenPOWER? Killing OpenPOWER?)

Or something else entirely!

 

[name99]

Looks like 2x the density for TSMC ... Not that good for samsung....

And Apple gets ~twice the density of AMD on the same TSMC process...

This has less to do with TSMC vs Samsung, and more to do with very different design targets. IBM needs huge amounts of large transistors to run all that IO, and their frequency. AMD still needs large transistors for frequency, but doesn't have nearly the IO. And Apple is chasing neither frequency nor lots of IO, so it can do with nothing but tiny transistors.