IBM is a company which mostly sells licences and allow the use of their patents these days. No wonder they spend so much on R&D with all the money they reap back from those. Either way, this is nothing new. IBM demonstrated 32 nm in 2004 and 22 nm in 2008. Their own chips didn't release on 45 nm before 2009-2010, so talk about a gap between IBM's laboratories and press releases, and their actual schedules.
Even if you take the release schedule from Intel, which always is the first to come with die shrinks due to their tick-tock process (now tick-tick-tock with Kaby Lake), and that's 4 to 6 years before the first commercial releases of products on these die manufacturing processes. The question remains whether a 7nm process will see their release date most closely mirroring the former or the later. On one side, chip costs are higher than ever, but on the other, there's a strong push for more efficient hardware on mobile platforms from Samsung and Apple.
