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Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

• literallyaduck 5y ago
  In the long run for the environment, and consumer closed hardware should be outlawed. Hardware should be open and built with repairable, upgradable, recyclable design, everything else is waste.
• amelius 5y ago
  But will it contain a Google Management Engine? Interestingly: > As of 2017, Google was attempting to eliminate proprietary firmware from its servers and found that the ME was a hurdle to that. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
  • wmf 5y ago
    Chromebooks (and virtually all laptops) have an embedded controller (EC) but fortunately the source is open: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/HEAD/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/H... If Google is building their own SoC they could move the EC on-chip. I don't know if it's worth the development effort.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    Pretty much any SoC powerful enough to use for this necessitates having an ME style core. The only question is if end users can change the code out.
  • neatze 5y ago
    All chromebooks are running coreboot that is open source, as far I understand. As much as google gets hate, pixel phone and chromebooks are made to be hacked, when contrasted with Apple.
  • KirillPanov 5y ago
    They already have a Google Management Engine in the chromebooks. It's called an "H1" chip: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2433 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2433 It's connected to the auxiliary lines on one of the USB-C connectors. Tickle it the right way and it will happily overwrite the boot firmware -- so long as the image you give it is signed by Google. It will do this without any intrusion into the chassis. Very convenient for, say, airport security inspectors, who would arouse suspicion if they took the time to open the case. Plug in the magic USB dongle, press the power button, the deed is done. There were a precious few aarch64 chromebook models without it, but they've all been discontinued.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I hope so. I had a Google Pixelbook, and with the Linux container support (aka Crostini) it was an ideal developer laptop, especially as the Linux support improved over time. I was worried they were going to drop it as the Pixel Slate is much more of a consumer device. Would love to see another Pixelbook with great performance and stability for Linux apps.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    I wouldn't be ever paying for space constrained Chromebooks, when I can get proper Linux laptop around 300 euros, with GPUs not stuck in GL ES 3.0 hardware level and plenty of SSD space.
    • Andrex 5y ago
      Links would be appreciated, I'm in the market.
      • pjmlp 5y ago
        I just got a Asus netbook from Amazon Germany without OS back in 2009, but with explicit Ubuntu support, the 1215B. However, shops like Netbook Billiger and Tuxedo Computers would be my options for a future replacement. No idea what would work out on your region.
    • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      To each their own. If I were solely looking for "a Linux laptop", correct, I'd get something else. But I find the combination of Crostini and ChromeOS ideal for me: 1. I can run any Android app on the device. I find this incredibly useful. 2. On the ChromeOS side of things, everything really "just works" for me - the Pixelbook is a really great combo of hardware and software. 3. There definitely were some Linux hiccups but they continually improved over time. The was container backups work in the UI is especially simple and easy to use.
      • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Cool, the more options the better. I almost uniformly support diversity: companies are better with many different types of people (and more fun to work at), different CPUs and other components with differing designs and supply chains, every country having their own culture and local economies, avoiding social media and connect directly via email and texts, less power in a few huge corporations, etc. re: Chromebook's: I always have one for casual web surfing especially when clicking links on places like Reddit that might take me to a infectious part of the web using a mislabelled URI.
  • nly 5y ago
    But will they all be fabbed by TSMC?
    • mark_l_watson 5y ago
      true! I would like to see more independent fabs in the USA and Europe, but not sure when that can happen.
      • beckman466 5y ago
        what's are the most prominent bottlenecks with lithography?
        • wtallis 5y ago
          ASML's monopoly on EUV tools, and their high cost, long lead times and low number of units shipped per year are probably the most significant limitation for leading-edge logic fabrication nodes. But even once you have one or two NXE:3400 tools, you still need at least a few years of R&D before you can get to commercially viable manufacturing of sub-7nm chips. (For example, TSMC developed their own pellicles for EUV rather than relying on ASML for that component.)
        • lillecarl 5y ago
          I think it's just kinda impossible to start one, it's prohibitively expensive to get the factories and equipments running, and there aren't enough people with the know-how of building and operating these things in the world. Not sure if I understood your question, but I hope so
• uncomputation 5y ago
  Another win for ARM! Glad to see the industry finally pivoting to RISC. I also wonder if this will integrate with Fuschia?
  • 1-more 5y ago
    Yah, RISC is good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9yCWv7NS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9yCWv7NS0
  • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    They pivoted 25 years ago with Pentium Pro.
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      Still has a phat decoder on the front, consuming power all the time + I don't want a disassembler to be a PhD project like it is for x86 with all its extensions and prefixes (and suffix?)
      • monocasa 5y ago
        In designs with a L0 uOP cache, they clock gate the decoder when just running out of L0. But it's really not that much power compared to a giant ROB and bypass network in these newer designs. And they don't really have suffixes in x86.
        • mhh__ 5y ago
          Hence the question mark, wasn't it 3DNow! The fact that it has a to have a big streaming cache just for the decoding puts it at a loss. Intel have only just gone 6 wide. Is it the end of the world? No. Do I want a RISC machine? Yes
          • monocasa 5y ago
            3Dnow used an immediate field for an extended opcode, but you still figured out the length of the instruction from looking at the first opcode bytes, so it's not really a suffix. As far as the decoder was concerned, it was just another fixed length, required imm field for the execution unit. It doesn't have to have a L0 cache; a lot of designs don't. And the decoder is wider than it seems. x86 instructions have more uOPs mainly from RMW instructions that would be three separate instructions in RISC. It'll be fun to compare Zen 4 (even at Ultrabook TDP) and M1 apples to apples once everyone has access to 5nm.
• deleted 5y ago
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• z3t4 5y ago
  I wonder if we will get more hardware optimizations for JavaScript
• bserge 5y ago
  More fragmentation and more control over their own hardware. Having general purpose PCs that you fully own was great while it lasted.
  • bdcravens 5y ago
    For many, their primary computing device has fully specialized for years.
  • 1-6 5y ago
    Fragmentation isn’t good. Open standards—-not open standards from one company—-is best. The shiny new computer will hold the title ‘fastest in its class’ initially but its longevity will be at the mercy of the company building it. Linux will get harder and harder to port over without jailbreaking.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    You can get full control over any Chromebook by opening the device up and removing a single firmware-write-protect screw. Try that with an iOS device. It's the difference between a useless toy and something you can actually customize to fit your needs.
    • KingMachiavelli 5y ago
      That's only true as long as Google wants it to be true.
      • notriddle 5y ago
        Unless you have a fab in your closet, your ability to get customizable computers will always be contingent on someone else making them for you.
        • KingMachiavelli 5y ago
          Sure but there are huge players in the x86 space so no one company could lock it down to only run companies $X software. Also the supplier and consumers are separate, Intel and AMD make the CPU and other parties like Microsoft, Linux. make the software, and then even other companies sell both the hardware+software (Amazon, Dell, HP, etc.) If custom ARM chips make x86 irrelevant and are designed 100% in-house then we could have a situation where the only option is running that locked-down/walled OS or using an old, outdated hardware. Sure you can run our own code in the cloud but that's still under the eyes of the cloud provider. Luckily this probably won't happen. Computation as a product is a large enough market that there should be sufficient demand for an open platform. Even if the market didn't provide this demand, a large number governments would raise concern & intervene.
• dinvlad 5y ago
  I went through multiple iterations of Chromebooks as a developer. I really wanted to love them, but they're just not powerful enough for it. Even opening multiple tabs slowed down the Pixelbook, for example. I think at this point, unless Google indeed drastically revamps the architecture to make it much more powerful for the buck, it's a dead product in this category. Education seems like the only market where it shines.
  • stickfigure 5y ago
    I don't think the Chromebook was ever aimed at developers. It's the console you use for your marketing and customer support team.
    • dinvlad 5y ago
      Not exactly - they've marketed it to developers with Crostini for a number of years now. But it's just not there, unfortunately.
  • zz865 5y ago
    They're not powerful enough to do all the work all the time but if you have a lot of web based work they're definitely perfect for a lightweight terminal.
    • dinvlad 5y ago
      "Lightweight on the go" I would say, especially if editing something remotely with good connectivity - sure, and might be a sweet spot. Though it's less convenient than having a general-purpose machine.. I've worked from coffee shops etc., and found it to be much more versatile to bring an extra pound of a Macbook instead, even for SaaS work with a remote IDE.
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Web can be the most demanding of applications in terms of memory and cpu (for what you get)
  • 5y ago
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  If such efforts are not curbstomped early, we'll end up with fully closed computing devices architecture, belonging to different vendors who provide whole vertical from bare metal to OS. There will be Google's processors/OS/software, Apple's, Samsung's, plus some shit CCP will come up with, like, TikToks, and all of them will be mutually incompatible, with own programming languages and data formats. The future looks bleak.
  • wmf 5y ago
    Chrombooks are pretty open, although totally non-standard.
    • spankalee 5y ago
      What's non-standard about them, and compared to what exactly?
      • wmf 5y ago
        They don't use UEFI/ACPI like every other PC.
        • surajrmal 5y ago
          They use ACPI. Not using UEFI was a perfectly reasonable choice. The bootloader is fully open source, led to improvements in boot speed and security. Booting non-chromeos images is possible and reasonably well documented. A standard bootloader may seem nice from an interoperability standpoint, but I'm not sure UEFI is a great place to land.
          • deleted 5y ago
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    • PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      A bunch of them don't even have Delete keys, which is fucking stupid.
• ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Following what your competitor is doing has not historically been a winning strategy in tech, I hope it works out for Google. Samsung with it's bespoke ARM chips and Apple with its chips make better, more capable, devices than Google can possibly make with off the shelf parts. That combined with having to pay the third party margin on the chips and you don't achieve leadership. But the challenge is that "organically" developing a core competency in semiconductor design is unlikely to succeed. Samsung was a chip company to begin with and Apple bought PA Semi for the expertise. Not that buying a company would necessarily help, after all their track record there is spotty at best.
  • Rd6n6 5y ago
    > Following what your competitor is doing has not historically been a winning strategy in tech There is a long history of tech companies copying competitors and taking over markets by executing better
    • ChuckMcM 5y ago
      You had me until you said "executing better" :-) Somewhat more seriously, I'm wondering if there has been a single adjacent market that Google has tried to enter and executed better than any existing player, much less the leader in the space.
      • jsnell 5y ago
        But other than browsers, mobile phone operating systems, ads, email, search, collaboration software, machine translation systems, mapping, ML hardware, internet video, identity providing, web analytics, autonomous driving, and virtual assistants, what products have the Romans ever executed well on?
  • jsnell 5y ago
    This isn't coming out of nowhere, they have been doing custom ASICs for a while already. The article mentions TPUs as an example. A more recent example are YouTube's in-house transcoding chips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Schools are giving out Chromebooks to teachers to live stream classes. It integrates with google classroom well. However its terribly slow if you have more than few tabs open.
• georgyo 5y ago
  Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted. But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products. So most of FAANG, all if you count the ones with consumer products. The first version of these CPUs will be very ARM compatible, as they are trying to drive adoption to of their silicon. Once there get a leg up they will start adding patented operation to their stuff. And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed. And because they are not OEMing this hardware, they really have no incentive to be cooperative with the others. Similar to older gaming console that had custom and experimental architectures. However it is obvious why this is all happening. And that is Intel and Qualcomm inhibited growth and squeezed too much profit from the market.
  • Avi-D-coder 5y ago
    Your right, but all of this will drive WASM adoption. I'm fine with papering over incompatibility as long as the costs continue to go down.
    • junon 5y ago
      WASM adoption is not something everyone agrees is a great thing in the context of physical CPUs.
    • astlouis44 5y ago
      100% this. Cross-platform binaries that "just work" everywhere in a hardware agnostic manner is going to be huge. Browser-based games and real-time 3D applications are the one's I'm most excited about, personally but that may be because I'm developing a WASM startup in this space.
      • kcb 5y ago
        They should think of a new slogan, maybe "Write once, run anywhere". Yea that sounds good.
        • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• mastrsushi 5y ago
  It’s cool to see 25+ yrs of x86 dominance schism off into all these Arm variants. I just hope we don’t see problems with portability like it’s the 70’s again.
• amm 5y ago
  CPU market fragmentation in the pro-sumer space is not necessarily a bad thing and might pave the way for RISC-V adoption in the coming years. More competition and a more diverse product landscape usually ends up benefitting the customers.
• rubyn00bie 5y ago
  This is the beginning of the commoditization of computer processing. Right now, the only thing that gives you a lead is what you can have fabricated... Apple and AMD using TSMCs fabs have proven this to be extremely true taking the top CPU spots from Intel the past ~3 years. While we will probably see a small spike in "custom dogshit CPUs" I don't think it will be long lived (maybe ~5 years that suck starting around the end of this decade). It certainly won't be worse than the current variety of processors in phones or random other small electronics. Not to mention there's little incentive to use hardware that has poor software support. Eventually (~25 years), the fabs will go from billions to millions to maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars. Purchasing a CPU will (eventually in like 40-50 years) simply be deciding how much power, heat, and physical space you have to budget... The reduced cost from mastering processes will mean companies are competing on price; which, is typically good for consumers and awful for the businesses involved. If anything, as we really push physics to its limits, the largest companies will likely be forced into cooperation to make any reasonable gains via something like RISC-V because of diminishing returns. I believe "Machine Learning" will be what leads the way for eventual commoditization of processor fabrication. Pretty much what Relativity has done with 3D printing rockets: using ML to correct, predict, and/or even utilize, what would now-a-days be considered physical flaws to produce extremely perfect parts... but instead of rocket parts, it'll be lithography and CPU fabs one day.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > Apple and AMD using TSMCs fabs have proven this to be extremely true taking the top CPU spots from Intel the past ~3 years. Absolutely not. The proved you can beat intel at lower transistor counts, at more or less similar frequencies.
• theshadowknows 5y ago
  I know nothing about how processors work so tell me if this even makes sense. But other than the time and money is there any reason that say a Google can’t create their 100% from scratch CPU and instruction set? Same for apple and all the others?
  • jraph 5y ago
    I don't see a clear value for them doing so. That's the almost purely time and money-unrelated reason I see. What's more, as far as I know, it's not their expertise area, they outsource this kind of work (architecture and cpu design), so if they had to develop their own architecture or CPU, relying on work from other companies with this expertise would probably lead to better results (for cheaper), for instance for a very specialized kind of work that would be more efficient with a specialized architecture. And yes, that would probably be very time-consuming and cost a lost of money and that alone is probably a big reason for not doing it, especially if there is no clear need for it. They probably would if they both had the expertise to do so and they were in a situation where developing a new architecture and CPU from scratch would allow them to save a lot of money. For general workloads, they are probably just better off using a widespread architecture to leverage existing tools and ecosystems. And maybe they actually do for internal stuff without us knowing, but that does not seem very likely.
• Popegaf 5y ago
  Yeah, really great news: more vertical integration for higher walls around those gardens. And, as usual, the majority of hackernews is celebrating this as a win and will happily shovel more money into the pockets of tax evasion and anti-competitions champions, privacy invaders, and polluters.
  • hyproxia 5y ago
    Honestly, some people legit scare me when they're talking about ARM/RISC-V. They usually have very little relevant knowledge/experience in the field (some don't even know what an ISA really is) yet worship these architectures like they're the second coming of Jesus. It really is easy to brainwash people en-masse.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      It is also easy if you deliver a machine that can do what they want it to do with superior performance, long battery life, no noise, and no heat.
• b20000 5y ago
  so is google docs working yet?
• outside1234 5y ago
  "Apple cargo cult"
• PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Google better hope that it sucks less at this than it does at UI and branding.
• sjg007 5y ago
  I have found the arm chrome books to be way better than the intel ones.
  • KirillPanov 5y ago
    Hey, if you are Simon J Glass (sjg), I want to thank you for all your work on chromebook coreboot and u-boot. And hope that someday you get the gru-kevin u-boot branch working :)
    • sjg007 5y ago
      Not him, but he sure does have an impressive resume!
• mdasen 5y ago
  The question I have around Google's CPU ambitions is what their end game is. I understand Apple's end game. They sold lots of iPhones and wanted to in-house the chips for that. Makes sense. Once they had that working well (and Intel was falling behind on their chips), they decided to put in-house chips in their macOS computers. Makes sense. AWS rents more CPU time than anyone out there. Makes sense for them to want to develop some custom chips for their stuff. What's Google's end game? They don't actually sell a lot of chips. I'd understand them wanting to create a server chip, but they seem to be targeting phones and laptops. Is Google looking to become a major player in Android hardware? I like the Pixel phones, but they're a very small part of the market. Chromebooks are usually built by companies like HP and Acer, not Google directly. The article says that Google's Pixel sold 7M units in 2019 (their highest year) and they're looking for 50% more than that (so 10.5M) for the Pixel 6. In 2019, Apple shipped 215M iPhones (over 30x the Pixel). Is Google looking to make the Pixel a much larger part of the Android ecosystem? Are they looking to compete directly with HP, Acer, and others in the Chromebook market? I guess I wonder what the end-goal is here. Maybe the premium on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips is so high that they'd rather make their own. Maybe they want to become the primary hardware vendor in the Android ecosystem - or at least a much larger one. But Google never seems to push its own hardware aggressively so it's a bit curious.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    Google doesn't need a solid plan to do something, they have more money than investment opportunities and since they are so "skilled" at shutting down projects it wont be a long term cost if it doesn't work out.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Apple didn’t decide to design their own chips because they sold a lot of phones, it was a differentiation play not a volume play. Designing their own chips means they can offer unique features it’s hard for their competition to replicate, like the machine learning acceleration stuff and hardware enabled security features. The Android OEMs are trapped in a perpetual race to the bottom, so they can’t afford to invest in premium hardware features. Google has realised the only way for them to compete head on with Apple on hardware enabled features is to design their own hardware because nobody else is going to do it.
• narrator 5y ago
  Please Google make a fab. You guys have smart enough people to figure out the chemistry and physics, and the world definitely needs more 5nm fabs.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    From everything I have seen, Google most certainly does not have the talent already to compete with TSMC. The talent does not even exist outside of Taiwan and China. And that creating a new cutting edge fab is the most complicated task known to man and becomes obsolete in a few years.
    • WoodenChair 5y ago
      > The talent does not even exist outside of Taiwan and China. Intel definitely has the talent and they’re in USA. They just haven’t had the right management for a while. Maybe now they do. Full disclosure—I own Intel stock.
• szundi 5y ago
  Interesting to see that when Intel stumbles, all the world is developing CPUs.
• sova 5y ago
  How many people are employed by Google as of 2021? This company has got to be huge, yet we always just say "Google" as if it's a few people.
• dboreham 5y ago
  dec re-born
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Google processors, for the advertising hive mind.
• w0mbat 5y ago
  This story is a month old, by the way.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  Seems like Chromebooks break their brand promise by not being slow enough. With a new slow custom chip, Google will kill Chromebooks the way they killed Google Pay and Wave and Loon and all the rest.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > the way they killed Google Pay But...they didn't kill Google Pay.
    • PaulHoule 5y ago
      See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastrous-year-continues-promised-bank-account-feature-is-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastro... a case of reverse imperialism if you ask me.
• crawsome 5y ago
  If they're killing them in 3 years anyway, I don't care :)
• marcodiego 5y ago
  Hello Intel! Note that Apple is slowly replacing your chips with M1. MS has similar machines with Snapdragrons. Amazon is using some non-x86 on its cloud. And now Google. Please, consider that getting rid of IME may gain some goodwill and attractiveness to your platform.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Interesting, I remember when Nokia exited the chip business in 2007. Up until then they had a lot of in house expertise for that. A few of my colleagues in Nokia Research were pretty upset about that at the time. In retrospect, this became a contributing factor to their demise. Their reasoning was that chips were a commodity, which at the time was correct. However they then backed the wrong partners (e.g. Intel, MS) and got cornered in a market they used to own and dominate. Windows phone and MS get a lot of blame for this. Also betting on Intels failed mobile strategy and going for Wimax instead of LTE definitely did not help. But the key thing was outsourcing their core technology bit by bit. And that started in 2007. By 2012, a lot of Nokia factories no longer existed and production had moved to China and they had changed software strategy so often that it all got very confusing. In the space of about five years they went from being the largest smart phone manufacturer to selling out to MS who then unceremoniously pulled the plug on the whole thing because there was very little left in terms of tech and skills worth salvaging. Windows Phone was a dud. Nokia as an Android phone manufacturer did not make a whole lot of sense (they actually launched one Android phone just before MS took ownership). Around the same time they also launched what could have been a Meego flagship device but was effectively a dead end when they killed off the entire team before putting that in the market. Already in 2010, Apple felt they needed to do the exact opposite and have more control over their hardware. Fast forward 11 years and now world + dog is doing their own chips. And Apple of course dominates the phone market with a strategy of basically doing everything in house. Just like Nokia used to do.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    The US phone market. Typing this from a Nokia phone.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > Their reasoning was that chips were a commodity, which at the time was correct. I think the real reasoning is to cut costs once a company achieves domination. If there is no political will in the executive ranks to continue spending on R&D, the executives will choose to cut costs today, coast for a few years and cash out on their “increased” performance. It is one of the reasons I like dapple, since as far as I can tell, Microsoft is just planning on collecting rent from Office, and Google execs like to toy around with a project for their own prestige and then kill it once a new boss comes around who cannot claim the initiative as their own.
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Someone should make amd64 royalty free and make this a real fight
• rawoke083600 5y ago
  G1 ?
• lincpa 5y ago
  [Warehouse/Workshop Model of Computer Hardware Architecture](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow#The-unification-with-Computer-Hardware-Architecture https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...) Follower Case: Apple M1 chip [Why my "warehouse/workshop model" can achieve high performance and low power consumption (take Apple M1 chip, Intel AVX-512, Qualcomm as examples)](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow/blob/master/doc/why_wwmodel_fast_en.md https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...)
• Havoc 5y ago
  Something with arm-like cheapness yet M1 like performance would be a pretty neat trick for the chromebook segment. I do worry about the google part though. They clearly think in terms of open technically but not really via gigantic catch. See android being open yet huawei being utterly screwed.
• davidgerard 5y ago
  This is interesting, 'cos Chromebooks started ARM then largely went x86. Current Chromebooks are more-or-less PCs, with slightly different boot loading; you can put x86 GNU/Linux on them if you want to. (Even Windows, if you're willing to mess with the BIOS.) I expect these ARM chips will be pretty conventional - because the other thing Chromebooks do is run Android apps.