Google is expanding efforts to design its own chips by hiring Uri Frank, a veteran of Intel with more than two decades of experience in custom CPU design, the company announced. Frank will head a new Isreal-based team for Google and serve as the company’s vice president of engineering for server chip design. “I look forward to developing a team here in Israel while accelerating Google Cloud innovations in computing infrastructure,” wrote Frank in a LinkedIn post announcing the change.
As Google and other tech giants seek more performance and energy efficiency, they increasingly turn to custom chip designs for specific use cases. Google has already launched several custom chips, including its tensor processing unit (to help with tasks like voice search and photo object recognition), video processing units and OpenTitan, an open source chip focused on security.
On the consumer side, Google already designs custom chips like Titan M and Pixel Neural Core for its phones. There have also been reports that Google is designing processors that could eventually power its Pixel phones and Chromebooks.
Despite the hiring, Google warns that it is not planning to build each server chip alone. “We buy where it makes sense, we build ourselves where we should and we aim to build ecosystems that benefit the entire industry,” explains the company. But the big change will be to try to integrate these different pieces of hardware into a single system on the chip (SoC), instead of through a motherboard where they are separated by “centimeters of wires” that introduce latency and reduce bandwidth . “SoC is the new motherboard,” says Google.
Other tech giants have similar ambitions for custom chips. Amazon has its ARM-based Graviton server chips, while Facebook has announced its own data center chip designs. Microsoft is also working on the design of its own server chips, as well as processors for its Surface PC line. Apple has several chip designs to its credit and is currently in the process of transitioning its line of Intel Macs to its own ARM-based processors.