[vegabook]

The Ars article you refer to appears to be fairly bullish on IBM's process technology and in particular the extreme ultraviolet lithography which has been problematic elsewhere. IBM has deep history of fundamental research turning into real product: just look at magneto-resistive drive heads as one example. I am much less sceptical than you that this company which has proven over many decades that it can drive fundamental technology forwards is only doing this for reasons of bamboozling the competition / investors.

Let's not forget that the chip in the Z series mainframes is the fastest commercial piece of silicon ever produced, and the high end Power8 chips handily outrun top-of-the-range 18-core Xeons on a number of benchmarks (though at worse power envelopes). (http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review...).

[acomjean]

I worked at IBM research for a bit (TJ Watson center Yorktown), when Gerstner was the CEO. They had PHDs chemists and physicists and mathematicians working on all sorts of things chip related. They had a mini fab in the building. I remember them testing building vibration levels.

Turning technology into something that can me manufactured and sold was something was something definetely on the mind of research. IBM was spending 6 Billion a year on research and they were looking for more results out of it.

They knew that an discovery/invention was good, but one that could be brought to market was better. The licensed a lot of their tech to the chip machine manufacturers if I remember correctly. Plus back in those days IBM had chip making facilities.