Comment Re:Are they available in the cloud? (Score 1) 113
The problem is that trying to fab a processor without a foundry seems to be a big disadvantage. For IBMs mainframe business its probably not a critical problem as they aren't as performance intensive.
But for something like POWER which directly competes with x86 I suspect that they will have an even harder time selling their processors if they follow the AMD (or sparc, mips, etc) route. The ARM vendors seem to do fine without foundries, but the best performing ones seem to regularly come from companies that actually have their own in house fabs.