Google is reportedly on its way to developing an in-house chipset like Apple’s A-Series SoCs. The search engine giant has just hired Manu Gulati, the Indian-origin micro-architect behind iPhone’s custom chips. Mr. Gulati has just joined Google after resigning from his post at Apple. This indicates that the future Pixel smartphones might come with custom-made processors.
On the top of signing up Mani Gulati, Google is also looking for SoC (System on Chip) related professionals. It has already announced openings for Mobile SoC Architect, Mobile SoC Memory Architect, Hardware Engineer and along with other posts.
To further instigate our curiosity, in its job requirement description, the search engine giant has clearly mentioned phrases like
“Architect the memory sub-system of a high-end mobile SoC; including core configuration and PPA (performance, power, area) trade-offs,” and “Help define the architecture of future generations of phone and tablet SoCs.”
Historically, Google has never been a full-fledged hardware company. It is more focused on its software part and advertising revenue. This is for the first time; the company is seriously into hardware designing or development. It looks like the astounding success of Apple’s chipsets has inspired Google to make its own SoC.
Also read: Snapdragon 845 Specs and Release Date Leaked
Presently, the mobile silicon industry is dominated by Qualcomm and MediaTek. Huawei has its own chipsets which go by the name ‘HiSilicon’. However, it comes with traditional ARM cores without any custom-made architecture. On the other hand, Samsung and Apple have their in-house designed CPUs. The former only uses it in their high-end products through. Now, it seems that Google will join the league soon.
The appointment of Manu Gulati is a significant step in Google’s in-house chip designing venture. We all know how powerful yet efficient Apple’s processors are. It is an interesting era where software companies are trying to develop hardware and manufacturing brands like Samsung are working on operating systems (Tizen) and smart assistants (Knox).
