Google Hires Intel Veteran Uri Frank To Lead Datacenter SoC Development

[Uskompuf]

Google has recently hired Intel veteran Uri Frank as VP of Engineering for the newly created server chip design division. The new division will develop custom Systems on Chip for use in Google datacenters to gain higher performance and to use less power by integrating hardware and software. Google has considerable experience in hardware development starting with its Tensor Processing Unit in 2015, its Video Processing Units in 2018, and in 2019 he first open-source silicon root-of-trust project. Google has also developed custom hardware solutions for SSDs, HDDs, network switches, and network interface cards in collaboration with external partners.

Google hopes to reduce the latency and bandwidth between different components by integrating them all into custom SoCs to improve power consumption and cost compared to individual ASICs on a motherboard. The development of these custom SoCs will be a long one with Google planning to hire hundreds of SoC engineers so we will be waiting a few years before we begin to see these deployed. This move is consistent with rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure who are both also developing custom server chips for their datacenters. Google will continue to purchase existing productions where it is more practical to do so and hopes to create an ecosystem that will benefit the entire industry.



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[watzupken]

Sounds like more trouble for Intel. All these initiatives to develop their own SOC, presumably using ARM chips, will erode Intels dominance.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

This move is consistent with rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure who are both also developing custom server chips for their datacenters.

Its a shame, they all just cant work together, instead Google is going to steal the hired help from the other two.

 

[Vya Domus]

SoCs for HPC is such a bizarre idea. I guess when you have so much money you can afford to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

I guess when you have so much money you can afford to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Amazon Graviton 2 and Ampere Altra already proved that ARM is more than viable in the Datacenters. This is a well-calculated move from Google.

 

[Vya Domus]

Amazon Graviton 2 and Ampere Altra already proved that ARM is more than viable in the Datacenters. This is a well-calculated move from Google.

Those are just CPUs , SoCs and CPUs are very different things.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

SoCs for HPC is such a bizarre idea. I guess when you have so much money you can afford to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

when I read this i thought about monkeys flinging mudpoop on the walls, then I realized who, rather, what was running google.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

Those are just CPUs , SoCs and CPUs are very different things.

Since it's a catch-all term, they probably meant CPU + interfaces + accelerators for tasks such as ML.