Google has been reportedly working on designing their own silicon chips, likely for use in the Google Pixel line of phones. First, we learned they were looking into it, only later to confirm it themselves a few months on. Since then, they’ve been putting out job listings and hiring people from within the industry who have worked with chip design. Now they have hired John Bruno, who was head of the silicon competitive analysis group at Apple — part of the system which keeps Apple ahead of the game when it comes to processors. He first worked at ATI, and then later rose to be the chief engineer over at AMD, leading the design of Fusion processors. Fusion refers to AMD’s APUs, processors with built-in above-average graphics capabilities, not quite unlike the modern SoCs we see on our phones.
It’s likely we’ll be seeing these recent hires by Google going towards making custom chips for Google devices, especially when we’ve already seen the custom-made Pixel Visual Core released with the Google Pixel 2. It’s possible (or even likely) that Google will take this route instead, creating specialized hardware for their devices rather than straight processors to compete with Qualcomm, MediaTek and HiSilicon. When there are already multiple (though not many) options currently available in the market, Google may feel there is no need to pour money into developing yet another chip. With Google possibly working to bring more unique hardware to the Pixel line, accompanied by excellent software in the form of HDR+, the company’s hardware division and its products will only get more interesting.
Hopefully, we’ll see the fruits of Google’s investment in the next few years. It could advance mobile hardware like Google have been trying to do with their cameras, so who knows where it’ll head next.
Via: Engadget
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