In the current smartphone world, only Apple (A series), Samsung (Exynos) and Huawei (Kirin) make custom SoCs for their phones. Xiaomi will also join this foray with their Surge S1 chips but we are yet to see them in their latest phones.
That is a very exclusive club and many smartphone manufacturers rely on Qualcomm and Mediatek as their source for SoC’s. Well, it seems now Google wants to leave this club and join the one pioneered by Apple by hiring a former chip architect from..you guessed it…Apple.
According to sources that informed Variety, Google has hired Manu Gulati, a veteran chip architect from Apple so that they can build their own chips for future versions of their well received phone, the Pixel. Gulati has been key in Apple’s efforts to make their own chips, which as of now are unmatched in terms of performance when compared with other SoC makers.
Google is now new when it comes to making their own custom chips. They have TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit) that are used for machine learning in their data centers and they recently revealed the next generation on this year’s Google I/O.
This move would ensure that Google will not rely on a third party supplier for SoC’s which are crucial since they contain the processor, modem, GPU, ISP (Image Signal Processors) and much more. This will turn make them optimize the software more efficiently for the hardware they would now be designing too, just like how Apple, Samsung and Huawei have been doing for a while.
