Uri Frank Joins Google To Design New Silicon

Google Has Grabbed Ex-Intel VP To Design Server Grade SoCs

Uri Frank most recently lead Intel’s Core processor development from 2016 to 2020 as VP and Director of Product Development for the Platform Engineering Group.  He has very recently left to join Google to help lead their new project to develop in house SoC solutions for their data centres.  This is rather important to Google as they continue to increase the density of their processing and storage while keeping power demands down to reduce both their power bill and carbon footprint.

There is no information on which architecture Alphabet will choose to implement, nor any indication if they will choose a consistent one.  ARM is the most popular architecture for SoCs, but it is also worth noting that Alphabet is a founding member of both RISC-V International and OpenPower.  Then again, with the arrival of Uri Frank, one cannot rule out an x86 based chip as that is historically his specialty.  Regardless, whoever they license from will be looking at significant income as Google does not do things on a small scale.

Currently AMD and Intel are both used to power their containers and data centres, while ARM and Qualcomm are the heart of Android devices which makes prognostication rather difficult.   It will be very interesting to see who Alphabet sources their next generation of silicon from and what new tricks they will teach it.