Designing chips is not something new for Google. The Mountain View giant already surprised us at the time with the Tensor and Tensor G2 SoCstwo chips that the company designed to be used exclusively in its Pixel smartphones, and which stood out for offering good CPU and GPU performance, and for achieving fantastic performance in AI and inference tasks, something essential to boost computational photography in said terminals.
The fact is that Google seems to have taken the “taste” of designing its own chips, and plans to broaden horizons by tackling the design of their own processors for servers and data centers. It is important to note that this is not something that is going to pay off overnight, we are talking about a complex move that will certainly take quite some time to materialize into a fully functional and truly competitive chip, but it is clear that It’s a major move by the American giant.
With this decision Google Follow Amazon’s steps, who began using its own Graviton processors in the servers of its subsidiary AWS (Amazon Web Services) in 2018. The details that we have at the moment are quite scarce, unfortunately, but the source of the news says that Google would be working on two different processors, one identified with the code name Cypress and another known as Maple.
Google Cypress would be a chip totaly new designed by the company from scratch, which means that this processor could bring an important layer of customization. For its part, the Maple model would be based on a Marvell Technology design, so its customization layer should be less, at least in theory.
Google’s “plan A” would be precisely the Cypress chip (its priority option), while Maple would be a kind of “plan B”. Both will use the ARM architecture and will be built on the 5nm node, but beyond this detail we do not have more information at a technical level, not even in relation to the possible count of cores or its working frequency, so right now we can only wait for a new leak to take place.
