The BiG Four increasingly develop their own chips

The BiG Four increasingly develop their own chips

San Francisco, Sept. 18, 2021

Facebook is developing its own machine learning chips to handle social media workloads, including content recommendation.

Another chip aims to improve the quality of videos in its apps through video transcoding. The move could help Facebook reduce its carbon footprint in its data centers and reduce its reliance on AMD, Intel, Nvidia and other chip vendors. More than 100 people are working on the ML chips, whose development costs are said to be relatively low.

In 2018, Facebook hired Shahriar Rabii as Head of Silicon Engineering, indicating that the company is focusing on internal chip design.

Apple, Amazon, and Google are also designing their own chips to save money and reduce reliance on external vendors.

Google has its own TPU line of AI processors as well as its own „Argos“ chip for video transcoding. The company is also building a new system on a chip. Amazon Web Services has its Graviton Arm line of CPUs. Apple announced last November that it would replace Intel’s x86 architecture with its own M1 processor, which is now used in iMacs and iPads.