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"Right now, its only in-house silicon is the Pixel Visual Core imaging chip inside the Pixel 2" This statement completely ignores the group making the TPU.
by drewg123 9y ago
"Right now, its only in-house silicon is the Pixel Visual Core imaging chip inside the Pixel 2"
This statement completely ignores the group making the TPU. Google has more hardware expertise than just the consumer electronics folks.
- puzzle 9y agoThere's a lot more. The article makes it sound like this is all recent, but the Visual Core was in the works for at least three years. Then there's the Titan security chip and the Lanai processor used in Google NICs. Google is heavily involved in RISC-V, through David Patterson, who also worked on the TPU and is, of course, famous for the Berkeley RISC that eventually turned into Sun's Sparc. It also has expertise in other areas like memory chips or more esoteric ones like silicon photonics. Then there is a bunch of former PA Semi folks and even an Alpha architect, Dick Sites, although none of those worked on CPU design at Google, AFAIK.
- dmoy 9y agoPatterson like Hennessy & Patterson?
- pavpanchekha 9y agoYes, same David Patterson.
- puzzle 9y agoYes. Hennessy is a Google board member, too. It's a small world.
- drivebycomment 9y agoDick retired last year. But your point still stands, as Google is flush with academic and industry veterans in processor design.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoAlso Norm Jouppi
- monocasa 9y agoI thought LANai was a Myricom design, not a Google one.
- puzzle 9y agoOriginally, yes: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/09/google_processor/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/09/google_processor/
- monocasa 9y agoThere's no real sources there that say that Google has custom LANai silicon. And, from what I've seen when the register writes about subjects that I actually have signed the NDA for, they just blatantly make shit up, knowing that no one is going to break their NDA just to correct them. AFAICT, Google was just given firmware access to Myricom's chips, and wrote an LLVM backend.
- X86BSD 9y agoYour explanation seems far more plausible to me.
- puzzle 9y agoThere are quite a few ex-Myricom people at Google, including two of the founders. One of which was also CEO: Nan Boden's bio mentions joining Google via acquisition. https://www.crunchbase.com/person/nan-boden https://www.crunchbase.com/person/nan-boden
- jacksmith21006 9y agoPlus Google hired Norm Joupolli (sp?) who worked on the MIPs chip a couple of years ago.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoTo be honest though this is exactly how Google likes it. Google actively encourage external production of misleading data about their capabilities. I recall sharing an article around inside of Google where the journalist had mentioned the development of a new data center and speculated that Google had at least 3 and as many as 6 data centers that they had built. At the time they were spending a billion dollars a quarter ($4B/year) on "capital expenditures" :-)
- jacksmith21006 9y agoWould tend to say the opposite. Google kept the PVC a secret until found in the pixel 2. We did not know about the TPU until used in production for a while. We did not know about the gen 2 TPUs until done. There is a long list of Google doing things and never sharing. Kind of the opposite of what you suggest.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI agree with you, I think I said it badly. Google is very secret about what they do and what capabilities they possess. If Urs had his way nothing they ever did would ever leave the building :-). But there are times when circumstance leads to a hint of what they are doing to leak out. When that happens, Google is pretty good at getting the narrative out that misleads about their actual capability. The real capability can be 100x what external sources might lead you to believe.