Google Chips?
Saul Hansell and John Markoff write about Google in The New York Times: A Search Engine That’s Becoming an Inventor.
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Even as it spends more than $1.5 billion this year on operations centers and technology, most of the hundreds of thousands of servers it will deploy are being custom-made based on Google’s own eccentric designs.
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“Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine,” said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. “They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable.” He said he believed that Google was the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.
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Mr. Reynolds estimated that Google’s computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users.
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Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s well-regarded Alpha chip.
“Google’s next step is to build high-performance silicon,” said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.
[Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for operations] said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.