Google is expanding its efforts to design its own chips with the appointment of 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 VP of Engineering for designing server chips. “I look forward to expanding a team here in Israel as I accelerate Google Cloud’s innovations in the field of computing infrastructure,” Frank wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the move.
As Google and other technology giants want more performance and power efficiency, they have increasingly turned to custom disk designs tailored to specific use cases. Google has already introduced several custom chips, including its Tensor Processing Unit (to help with tasks such as voice search and photo object recognition), Video Processing Units, and OpenTitan, an open source security-focused chip.
On the consumer side, Google already designs custom chips like the Titan M and Pixel Neural Core for its phones. There are also reports that Google is designing processors that could eventually power their Pixel phones and Chromebooks.
Despite the rent, Google warns that they do not plan to build each server chip themselves. “We buy where it makes sense, build it ourselves where we need to and strive to build ecosystems that benefit the entire industry,” the company explains. But the big change will be trying to integrate these different pieces of hardware on a single system on the chip (SoC), rather than via a motherboard where they are separated by an inch of wires which introduces the delay and reduces the bandwidth. “The SoC is the new motherboard,” says Google.
Other technology giants have similar custom disk ambitions. Amazon has its ARM-based Graviton server chips, while Facebook has announced its own design chips for data centers. It is also thought that Microsoft is working on the design of its own server chips, as well as processors for its range of Surface PCs. Apple has several disk designs to its name and is currently switching its Mac range from Intel to its own ARM-based processors.