Google may be considering building its own chips for its servers, dropping Intel processors in favor of a design based on ARM's architecture — the same kind of chips found in almost every smartphone and tablet today, a new report says.
Bloomberg reported Google's alleged plans, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. Google obviously runs a lot of servers and is Intel's fifth-largest customer, according to the report, so if the company suddenly moved to a different kind of chip, it would have big consequences to the market.
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Assuming it's true (which is a big if), the question becomes, "Why would Google do this?" Google is a massive company with a lot of money, but outside of its Motorola subsidiary, it doesn't mess around much with processors. If it's suddenly interested in creating its own server chips, it must think it can get a competitive advantage by taking the designs in-house.
"As an example, Apple builds its own [chips] for phones," says Anand Lal Shimpi, a processor expert and founder of AnandTech. "They tend to build things that aren't available on the market. It does give them an advantage. Is there a competitive advantage that they see if they had an architecture that Amazon or Facebook didn't?"
Whenever Intel and ARM are pitted against each other, the issue of power efficiency is often front and center. ARM designs traditionally excel at efficiency, while Intel designs generally win on performance, but the gap between both is narrowing.
Google runs a lot of servers, and they can be notoriously inefficient; a recent report from the New York Times said data centers can waste as much as 90% of the electricity they pull from the grid. ARM-based servers might have the potential for big energy savings — particularly if they're used in a microserver design, a special kind of server that scales better for lower power consumption.
However, Intel makes microserver designs, too, and ultimately, Google needs to prioritize performance first and energy efficiency second.
"What matters to Google is are the search results going to appear as fast as humanly possible," says Lal Shimpi. "They're not willing to sacrifice on that metric. Along those lines, there's no faster way to serve up the content that they're serving up without buying these really high-performing chips from Intel."
The Boomberg report says Google is mulling the switch to ARM because it would like to better marry its server hardware and the software that runs of them. That sounds sensible, but it makes it sound like Google is buying Intel server chips from a shelf. In reality, as one of Intel's biggest customers, Google can ask the chipmaker to design anything it wants, and Intel will do it.
"In the server space, Intel loves Google," says Lal Shimpi. "They'll build whatever. Intel will do whatever it takes to take care of them."
Of course, any technology that Intel creates while pursuing Google's targets will have benefits for the chipmaker's other customers, too — notably Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook. Perhaps Google no longer wants to swim in the same processor pool as its rivals. There may be another reason, too.
If Google is really planning a move away from Intel, there's no way its designs would be ready for deployment in anything less than four years, Lal Shimpi says, unless it was developing them in secret all along. It could simply be that Google is looking at using ARM chip designs just for a few specialized cases, and not a wholesale move away from Intel for all its data centers.
"You have Intel across the board, and you do some ARM stuff in some special areas," says Lal Shimpi. "And there's some motivation: Until recently Intel didn't have a good microserver solution, and that's a power-efficiency play."
Then of course there's always the possibility that this is all just part of a negotiation. Intel has a lock on most of the server processor market, and it can afford to charge a premium for its chips since there are few alternatives. Google publicly contemplating a switch could just be a carefully leaked tidbit aimed at getting a better price as the company continues to process more data — and build facilities to process it.
"Intel's enterprise space is ripe for disruption in terms of pricing," says La Shimpi. "Intel will sell you a chip in enterprise for far more than they will sell you a chip in consumer/client. And there's really no competition there at all. And if I'm Google, I might be playing around with ARM to ensure there's some competition in the space."
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