
Struggling IBM pays $1.5B to dump its chipmaking business - ohjeez
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/struggling-ibm-pays-1-5-billion-to-dump-its-chipmaking-business/
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mjevans
I had thought this was already discussed given that I usually see stories on
Hacker News before other sites (and thus that I'd missed the discussion of
this topic).

Assuming this is a new posting; while I agree this is good from the
perspectives of what IBM appears to consider it's core business and also from
the viewpoint of having stronger competition among third party foundries I am
curious about an aspect that was mentioned but not well discussed on those
other stories.

"With IBM essentially bowing out of everything other than R&D and
GlobalFoundries licensing Samsung’s 14nm process rather than licensing IBM’s
or developing their own, Samsung is now the strongest member in a party of 2.
How GlobalFoundries and Samsung continue this relationship – and more
importantly GlobalFoundries’ role as a developer versus a customer/licensee –
remains to be seen." (Ref:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/8631/globalfoundries-
acquires-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8631/globalfoundries-acquires-
ibms-semiconductor-manufacturing-business-ibm-bows-out) )

How does this reflect competition between these third party foundries used by
Intel's competition on many fronts (AMD and various embedded system/mobile
device chipset manufacturers) with respect to narrowing or eliminating the
process node advantage?

