Google is putting more pressure on investment in silicon and reducing what it can do with motherboards to focus on chip systems. Leading this effort will be Uri Frank, who joined the company after two decades of custom chip design engineering and as an executive at Intel.
It’s not the first big name that Google attracted to the main design: it hired chip architect Manu Galati from Apple in 2017.
But this engagement – Frank will focus on server chip design – reflects the company’s years-long trend toward home components, from memory to network equipment and its core projects, such as processors for TensorFlow, a custom video processor unit and OpenTitan for chip-based security. Pixel phones have also benefited from the development race with neural and visual cores.
In a post on the Google Cloud blog, the company says it is “no longer enough” to combine elements on a motherboard with the inherent latency of the connecting wires.
“To get more performance and use less power, our workloads require even deeper integration with the underlying hardware,” says the post.
With all of these chips being made without even appearing on third-party hardware, it also seems appropriate to predict that Google’s thirst for original hardware for consumers and businesses – especially for the cloud – will remain for a while.
