Google's recent hiring of ex-apple SOC architect could mean custom SOC for next pixel

[JohnnyCorporalTech]

Google may been working to design custom SOC's for future mobile devices. A recent hire at Google indicates big changes are coming for future versions of the Pixel phone. It seems that google may have just hired the ex-apple micro-architect, Manu Gulati, who worked on the development of apples SOC's for nearly eight years.

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Manu Gulati, has just joined Google, announcing the hire today on his Linked-in profile.

this is a completely new path for google as they 

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currently relying on third-party chips for all their products. 

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Internally designed chips were not a focus for Google in the past, but this looks to be changing.

what do you guys think? will google be able to utilize the knowledge of an ex-apple employee and leap-frog apple in terms of performance? Where do you think google will start, in the creation of SOC's?

 

Sources:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15791918/google-hires-apple-chip-architect-pixel-phones

 

http://wccftech.com/pixel-custom-socs-google-hiring/

[RadiatingLight]

These things take a long time to develop. maybe the pixel 4. definitely not the pixel 2

[Jurrunio]

They won't come in the near future. Custom SoC will be more expensive than using existing designs from others, namely ARMs design. Even for huge companies like Google, it's more reasonable to find partners before starting these big projects. Not saying that they cant start right away, but not the smartest move from financial perspective.

[LAwLz]

7 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

These things take a long time to develop. maybe the pixel 4. definitely not the pixel 2

They might already be working on it.

Google got quite a few hardware engineers on their team already, and they are already putting out products like their TPUs.

 

If I had to guess, I'd say Google will develop their own chip but maybe not their own CPU cores, and the reason for making their own chip is so that they can focus on implementing DSPs designed for machine learning.

TensorFlow Light was talked about quite a bit at Google IO this year, and one of the things they talked about was how future phones could include dedicated hardware for machine learning tasks. Making your own chip would be one way to make sure it gets implemented in at least one product (to encourage other manufacturers to implement it), and they could also oversee all the benefits and possible issues of their hardware and software.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Jurrunio said:

They won't come in the near future. Custom SoC will be more expensive than using existing designs from others, namely ARMs design. Even for huge companies like Google, it's more reasonable to find partners before starting these big projects. Not saying that they cant start right away, but not the smartest move from financial perspective.

 

And then you have companies that go and buy other companies instead of developing their own products from scratch.  Google are the masters of that too. 

[DocSwag]

If you looked at the LinkedIn site, it said for networking and security stuff, so it doesn't make sense to be for an smartphone SoC. That's not to mention it's too recent to develop an soc for the Pixel 2, google would've had to have it taped out by now.

[SCHISCHKA]

maybe he is being employed to guide their upcoming operating systems?

It would be quite useful to employ someone with his knowledge.

working from my memory, they have a project for a OS to work on low end hardware and they have a project to unify android and chrome OS.

[dizmo]

Definitely won't be for the next Pixel. That'd be way, way too soon. 

6 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

They won't come in the near future. Custom SoC will be more expensive than using existing designs from others, namely ARMs design. Even for huge companies like Google, it's more reasonable to find partners before starting these big projects. Not saying that they cant start right away, but not the smartest move from financial perspective.

Even Apples chips are based on ARM design. 

[Sniperfox47]

I'll be interested to see where google goes with their smartphone's SoCs in the future. As close as they are with Qualcomm, I don't think it's any secret they'd like to get away from a dependency on them and their hardware lifecycle.

 

I could totally see them building up their own chips though to implement a Tensor Light Processing Unit and integrated Tango DSP, since those seem to be two big focusses for them with the Android platform.

[Doobeedoo]

Maybe they'll go with two very big cores and additional two for efficient tasks heh.

[mr moose]

15 hours ago, dizmo said:

Definitely won't be for the next Pixel. That'd be way, way too soon. 

Even Apples chips are based on ARM design. 

You might appreciate this:

 

 

[BuckGup]

Didn't google make its own quantum computer and they also made their own TPUs?