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The very first paragraph : > “ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is working with Google and other U.S. tech giants to develop a new way of making semicond

The very first paragraph : > “ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is working with Google and other U.S. tech giants to develop a new way of making semiconductors more powerful.” The title is unfortunately misleading as it makes it look like only Google and TSMC are “pushing the boundaries” whereas it also includes other tech companies.

option 6y ago
and compared to others like AMD and NVIDIA, Google’s share of chips is negligible
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Do you have numbers on that? Google was one of the largest manufacturers in the world for a couple years there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still up there.
  - selestify 6y ago
    What years were those? Why did they stop?
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.
  - thunkshift1 6y ago
    Are you serious?? I don’t think that has happened.
    - Mr_P 6y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if Google's TPU's pushed them far over the edge on this. I'd bet TPUs running inference for Ads models can basically print money for the company. They've also already been building their own network chips for some time. So, given the scale of their datacenters, I think it's entirely reasonable that they'd outpace nvidia.
      - stingraycharles 6y ago
        I think you may have too high expectations of how much TPUs Google really needs, and how much of those Google is using for training Adsense models. There are such an insane number of processors being made, we have Apple, Amazon, AMD, Nvidia, Google all buying their stuff from TSMC. I would be very surprised if Google was the biggest of them all.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Absolutely. They were reportedly the largest player in the server space around 2012 [1] (and consumed the entirety of their own production). Since then they've had multiple high-sellers across multiple product categories. The Google home devices ship tens of millions of devices a year on their own. Google may be better known for software and it's not all on the leading edge nodes, but they produce a lot of HW. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/

option 6y ago

and compared to others like AMD and NVIDIA, Google’s share of chips is negligible

AlotOfReading 6y ago
Do you have numbers on that? Google was one of the largest manufacturers in the world for a couple years there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still up there.
- selestify 6y ago
  What years were those? Why did they stop?
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.
- thunkshift1 6y ago
  Are you serious?? I don’t think that has happened.
  - Mr_P 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Google's TPU's pushed them far over the edge on this. I'd bet TPUs running inference for Ads models can basically print money for the company. They've also already been building their own network chips for some time. So, given the scale of their datacenters, I think it's entirely reasonable that they'd outpace nvidia.
    - stingraycharles 6y ago
      I think you may have too high expectations of how much TPUs Google really needs, and how much of those Google is using for training Adsense models. There are such an insane number of processors being made, we have Apple, Amazon, AMD, Nvidia, Google all buying their stuff from TSMC. I would be very surprised if Google was the biggest of them all.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Absolutely. They were reportedly the largest player in the server space around 2012 [1] (and consumed the entirety of their own production). Since then they've had multiple high-sellers across multiple product categories. The Google home devices ship tens of millions of devices a year on their own. Google may be better known for software and it's not all on the leading edge nodes, but they produce a lot of HW. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/