Google has announced plans to begin manufacturing its own Systems on Chip (SoC) that will enable large computing platforms with low power consumption in the future. According to an open letter from Google, the development of the server-level SoC will be the next step for the company in the process of improving the hardware of its data centers.
As explained in the open letter, until recently, in the matter of improving the equipment of data centers, the company adhered to the tactics of integrating components with motherboards. However, in this case, the components are separate from each other and are connected by "inches of wires". SoC will solve this problem, since a large number of functions can be implemented in a single chip. In addition, multiple chips can be used.
Compute at Google is at an important inflection point. To date, the motherboard has been our integration point, where we compose CPUs, networking, storage devices, custom accelerators, memory, all from different vendors, into an optimized system. But that’s no longer sufficient: to gain higher performance and to use less power, our workloads demand even deeper integration into the underlying hardware. - Google said on blogpost.
To develop the SoC, Google hired an Intel specialist, former vice president of the Intel Platform Engineering Group, Uri Frank, who led the development of Core processors in 2016-2020.
What architecture will be used in the systems developed by Google, and what exactly they will be used for, the company does not specify.