Citation needed
All I've seen from them in my professional experience is actually legacy mainframe maintenance.. Not shovelware, but very far from hardcore tech.
PALO ALTO, Calif. – IBM defined at (trade show ed.) Hot Chips a new interface for the 2020 version of its Power 9 CPUs. The Open Memory Interface (OMI) will enable packing on a server more main memory at higher bandwidth than DDR, and as a potential Jedec standard could rival GenZ and Intel’s CLX.
OMI basically removes the memory controller from the host, relying instead on a controller on a relatively small DIMM card. Microchip’s Microsemi division already has a DDR controller running on cards in IBM’s labs. The approach promises to deliver up to 4TBytes memory on a server at about 320GBytes/second or 512GB at up to 650GB/s sustained rates.
https://research.ibm.com/blog/albany-semiconductor-research-... etc
IBM doesn't have fabs, but they still do R&D into semiconductors that very much target future commercial processes. They do a fair bit on quantum computing too, to name just a couple of things.
If IBM split off half of their mainframe division and let some competition get going I think the segment could actually be something to contend with.
The basic idea of the IBM mainframe is almost perfect for what a lot of companies actually need (massively reliable hardware to support lots of middling software; most work is shunting data around) but everyone knows they're going to get locked into IBM.
There really aren't a lot of companies out there that can claim to do similar (and of course besides s390x, an ancient and venerable CISC, IBM also has Power, so they are doing this 2x over). You'll find a lot of IBM employees contributing to what I'd consider "hardcore" tech like LLVM and the Linux kernel as a result, because they genuinely have a large amount of expertise in those and similar areas. And here I'm not even really including Red Hat, but if you include them then they are even more overweight in the hardcore tech category.
If anything, a lot of the rest of the tech industry has left "hardcore tech" behind due to efficiency concerns as a result of a longrunning industry wide process of consolidation and commodification that IBM has resisted for obvious reasons. IBM is hardcore to a fault if anything.
TLDR: I actually think IBM punches above their weight in the "hardcore tech" area so long as our definition is sufficiently low level rather than say, cloud services, in which case fair enough you can probably fairly say they suck at that.
Here I've also chosen to entirely ignore IBM research.
