I believe the fab process is the root problem. My uninformed take on the issue is that IBM's fabrication technology was never able to deliver on the performanc

I believe the fab process is the root problem. My uninformed take on the issue is that IBM's fabrication technology was never able to deliver on the performance vs. power projections so they traded off power in order to maintain the performance, and that is why POWER takes so much power. IBM went down the Silicon On Insulator (SOI) path and bet the farm that they could beat Intel's fab technology with that. IBM promised SOI would allow them to make high speed, low power chips. They were unable to deliver on the promise and IBM lost to Intel, along with the rest of the "IBM Alliance" (AMD, Freescale, Chartered Semi, and others). With respect to the IBM Alliance, it was not kind to any of the members. Many of the members ended up rolled up into Global Foundaries. Global Foundaries was the AMD foundary that was spun out of AMD, Chartered Semi was bought by Global Foundaries, and IBM ended up paying Global Foundaries $1.5 billion (plus took a pretax charge of $4.7 billion) to take their fab plants. Freescale lost the Apple CPU socket because of power and performance problems and has struggled. Ref: SOI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_insulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_insulator Global Foundaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries Dreams: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/ibm-alliance-will-take-the-fight-with-intel-down-to-32nm/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/ibm-alliance-will-tak... Disasters: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-19/ibm-agrees-to-pay-globalfoundries-1-5-billion-to-take-chip-unit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-19/ibm-agrees...