Re: The Design of Design

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)