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There'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 se
by puzzle 9y ago
There'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.