When I did my thesis at university, my professor worked there back in the 60's IIRC (electrical engineering). He said what they did was: Company had a turnover of 10 to the 11 $ 1% spent on R&D... 10 to the 9 $ with that 10 to the 9, they hired 10 to the 4 PHDs and gave each of them a budget of 10 to the 5... this is in the dollars of the day - not todays dollars....

Ingres was renamed to Actian and have released an analytic/reporting database called "Vectorwise" which makes use of SIMD and many other innovations in data throughtput techniques(everything in the Intel optimisation manual plus a lot more) and it gets more than 70 times performance. Check out TPC-H results "This is not an advertisement"