Facebook plans to develop its own chip
Social media giant Facebook recently posted a post on its social network saying that it is recruiting hardware teams to prepare chips for research and development! In the future, technology giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon are working toward self-sufficiency. According to the content of the post, Facebook is recruiting hardware engineers for both ASIC and FPGA chips. It can be seen that it is preparing for the development of artificial intelligence hardware in the future, mainly designing end-to-end custom ASIC chips, from front-end design to back-end hardware standards, drive research and development.
SoC chips are mainly used for mobile devices, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are chips that are customized for a certain function. For example, there are currently chips specifically developed for digital mining. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a kind of modular chip. It only needs to use software to change the main function of the chip and achieve the purpose of customization.
On the one hand, Facebook is obviously doing this to reduce the dependence on Qualcomm and Intel’s chips. On the other hand, it also lays the foundation for hardware products such as Oculus’s virtual reality glasses. Apple has developed A-series chips for its own devices. In 2020, a custom version of the ARM chip will be used in Mac computers to replace the Intel-based chips currently used; Google has also developed its own artificial intelligence chips; Amazon is also developing its own chips for its own Alexa smart hardware.
Source: Bloomberg
