Former Intel exec joins Google to be responsible for the development of custom chips

Uri Frank, former vice president of Intel Engineering Design Group, joined Google to lead Google’s custom chip R&D team in Israel.

Uli Frank worked for Intel for many years and was promoted from engineer to vice president of the engineering design group. He has very rich experience in management and chip research and development.

Joining Google this time is naturally good news for Google. At present, many technology giants are gradually getting involved in custom chips, and Google is no exception.

Google’s research and development of custom chips are more to provide support for Google’s cloud computing business, and Microsoft is also developing chips to provide support for consumer devices and servers.

In fact, Google’s time to get involved in the development of custom chips is still early. In 2015, Google launched the first batch of TensorFlow chips for machine learning.

In 2018, Google announced the development of video processing chips and launched the OpenTitan open-source chip in 2019. The next development of custom chips will be more abundant.

It is undoubtedly a celebration for Google to hire Intel engineering design executives with rich experience, which can greatly improve the efficiency of Google chip research and development.

Especially in cloud computing to provide developers with more differentiated services to improve the competitiveness of Google’s cloud computing business, and this aspect is currently Google’s weakness.

In the field of cloud computing, Amazon and Microsoft have a higher market share, which is why Google continues to invest heavily in cloud computing.

Compute at Google is at an important inflection point. To date, the motherboard has been our integration point, where we compose CPUs, networking, storage devices, custom accelerators, memory, all from different vendors, into an optimized system. But that’s no longer sufficient: to gain higher performance and to use less power, our workloads demand even deeper integration into the underlying hardware. Instead of integrating components on a motherboard where they are separated by inches of wires, we are turning to “Systems on Chip” (SoC) designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip, or on multiple chips inside one package. In other words, the SoC is the new motherboard.