My hunch is that this is theater. The executives wanted this program as a weapon. Google didn't like being at the mercy of processor suppliers. Now they can threaten to just make their own. It could ultimately turn out to be a bluff, if their suppliers drop their price and improve their lineup. Source: made it up.
Nonetheless, Intel and AMD must be sweating as another hyperscaler breaks away from using x86 exclusively.
They probably already knew it was coming. Announcing it 2 weeks before Alphabet/Google quarterly results might be timed.
It's obviously timed to the Google Cloud Next conference, which starts today.
The Cloud Next Conference is obviously timed to the quarterly results which is obviously timed to the ARM processors, wait, no, the ARM processors are obviously time to the Cloud Next Conference which is obviously timed to the quarterly results
And it's all timed to come out before Halloween. What kind of sorcery is this?
This is probably one reason why Intel is moving towards providing foundry services. The barrier to entry for doing chip manufacturing is higher than for designing chips now. It’s still an open question if Intel can compete with TSMC and Samsung though.
Intel 4 is superior to anything Samsung offers, and not nearly as far behind TSMC's 3nm density as people are lead to believe. The "open question" is mostly about fab scaling and the business side of foundary management. Their silicon works just fine in the market as it stands.
I read a lot about how important it is for a foundry to be able to work with customers and this used to miss from the company DNA of Intel. Cell library, process that sort of thing. We shall see.
Intel 20a and 18a are the really exciting processes yet to come out from everything reported. It seems like a game of catch up until then.
I doubt it, Google has been using Ampere for some time.
Right, Google invested in non x86 since 2016 afaik (I was in the team supporting arm powerpc inside Google). At the size of Google, it's pretty much can break from any vendors without damaging it's core businesses