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So they are going to design their own chips for the consumer devices (Oculus Go and the speakers)? Those are two very different use cases, heavy 3D and speaker

So they are going to design their own chips for the consumer devices (Oculus Go and the speakers)? Those are two very different use cases, heavy 3D and speakers generally are simple. I am not sure Facebook will have sufficient volume of either of those to justify making its own chips. Apple sold 250M iPhones in 2017. Facebook sold less than 1M Oculus Rifts in 2018. The other place that Facebook could use its own chips is in its datacenter. This would make a little more sense as it is easier to deploy custom chips into a datacenter you fully control. There are theoretically cost and energy savings possible from switching from Xeon D to ARM in the datacenter at Facebook's scale.

reacweb 9y ago
I think the point is not to become a chip producer, but to cut a hard point of dependency. My point is easier to understand for software development. Imagine a society outsourcing 100% of its software development. If it has a problem with a provider, it has no other solution than to ask another one. As all providers have similar business logic, the problem may not be solved. Imagine the society outsources only 95% of its software development. It has a lot more power over its providers because it can decide to do conflictual projects in-house. IMHO all societies should keep technical expertise of their key technologies by having some internal developments (software and if possible hardware).