Why doesnt IBM make x86 processors?

[NicholasNicholasNicholas]

IBM's processors are years ahead of intels. In 2010 their processors were better than haswell but were useless to most because it doesnt use x86. I know that they dont own x86, but cant they just buy it or make something so close to it that it will still work with modern OSes? 

[79wjd]

Even if they had an x86 (and an x86-64) license they wouldn't have a compelling architecture to make a worthwhile CPU. And no, you can't just make something close to x86 that will work with an x86 OS (at least not without some form of emulation, which will trash performance).

[NicholasNicholasNicholas]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

Even if they had an x86 (and an x86-64) license they wouldn't have a compelling architecture to make a worthwhile CPU.

But they have many, many more STEMs working for them and couldnt some of their current architecture be salvaged? 

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, Nickathom said:

But they have many, many more STEMs working for them and couldnt some of their current architecture be salvaged? 

Their architecture is highly parallelized, and it wouldn't scale to a consumer/enterprise x86 CPU. So developing a capable x86, that would rival Intel/AMD, would take them at least five years and a ridiculous amount of money. It's just not worthwhile. 

2 minutes ago, rrubberr said:

Aren't they still RISC.

Yes they are.