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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the roll-your-own dept.

A Facebook job posting indicates the company is looking to design its own system-on-a-chip or Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC):

Facebook Inc. is building a team to design its own semiconductors, adding to a trend among technology companies to supply themselves and lower their dependence on chipmakers such as Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., according to job listings and people familiar with the matter.

The social media company is seeking to hire a manager to build an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization," according to a job listing on its corporate website, indicating the effort is still in its early stages.

The Menlo Park, California-based company would join other technology giants tackling the massive effort to develop chips. In 2010, Apple Inc. started shipping its own chips and now uses them across many of its major product lines. Alphabet Inc.'s Google has developed its own artificial intelligence chip as well.

Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:09PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:09PM (#669163) Journal

    I'm all for more architectures. Intel's architecture is decades old. Starting with a design having segment registers in order to maintain assembly source code compatibility with the 8080. Geez. And the baggage it carries.

    How about if instead of each company designing their own chips, they get together as a group, sort of like with Open Compute. This project designed open standard racks, power supplies, and basically everything in a data center right down to the motherboards. In theory if you buy from Open Compute vendors, your equipment should be interchangeable. Why not do this with processors, or at least motherboard / processor combinations?

    I agree with the idea that trying out more new architectures is a good idea. Let's introduce some evolution and survival of fittest and see what benefits it leads to.

    As a software guy: I vote for more and more cores! Developers need to learn to use those. We have plenty of frameworks. It's not that hard with a little learning. It's mostly a change in thinking. Always be looking for opportunities to split things into parallel work -- but realize the overhead costs per workload unit so that you do it efficiently.

    Oh, and hey, how about an OPEN architecture while you're at it. Let's try to have MORE manufacturers not fewer.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:44PM (#669180) Journal

    You seem to be under the mistaken impression that these people want open markets. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each is seeking out more exclusivity for themselves, for instance, with the abuse of copyright/patent law. Amongst all these companies the customer is the common enemy, to be conquered and held captive, with harsh regulations on how they can use the tech (DRM, DMCA, etc...)

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:00PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:00PM (#669261) Journal

      Sadly, you're probably right.

      That, despite the benefits they could mutually have by cooperating.

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      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:15PM (#669202)

    facebook is involved in the open compute initiative. maybe this will be too?