Facebook To Design Its Own Processors For Hardware Devices, AI Software, and Servers (bloomberg.com) 56
Facebook is the latest technology company to design its own semiconductors, reports Bloomberg. "The social media company is seeking to hire a manager to build an 'end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization,' according to a job listing on its corporate website, indicating the effort is still in its early stages." From the report: Facebook could use such chips to power hardware devices, artificial intelligence software and servers in its data centers. Next month, the company will launch the Oculus Go, a $200 standalone virtual-reality headset that runs on a Qualcomm processor. Facebook is also working on a slew of smart speakers. Future generations of those devices could be improved by custom chipsets. By using its own processors, the company would have finer control over product development and would be able to better tune its software and hardware together. The postings didn't make it clear what kind of use Facebook wants to put the chips to other than the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence. A job listing references "expertise to build custom solutions targeted at multiple verticals including AI/ML," indicating that the chip work could focus on a processor for artificial intelligence tasks. Facebook AI researcher Yann LeCun tweeted about some of the job postings on Wednesday, asking for candidates interested in designing chips for AI.
Baked-in spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
DO NOT WANT.
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The Process that steals your identity (Score:3)
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and this new vacuum can suck on my balls
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They're developing the vacuum from J. Edgar Hoover's wet dreams.
87+Million⦠(Score:2)
NOW could care less what FB says, does or
Testifies
Watching the watchers (Score:2)
I wonder if all this is a reaction to the Chinese building so many chips for US domestic consumption, and that process coming under scrutiny as a security threat as well as due to IP theft and corporate espionage. Huawei just today got out of the US networking space because of US gov warnings against buying their kit on national security grounds, but the same should eventually apply to buying chips and chipsets fabbed in China.
Controlling your chip design is a good first step toward making sure there is not
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China has offered US and European Chipmakers 1 Trillion dollars in Govt matching funds if they set up a chip design ecosystem in Shanghai. Everyone is scrabbling for these funds by setting up their own Chip shops. Its the new .com boom. Doesnt matter if you have a working chip as long as you can get the matching funds and exit
Hire a WHAT to design??? (Score:5, Funny)
seeking to hire a manager to build an 'end-to-end SoC/ASIC
lolz - Good luck; the vast majority of managers top out at building powerpoint presentations.
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" the vast majority of managers top out at building powerpoint presentations"
Hardware engineering is 50% powerpoint, therefore engineering managers come from the top 50% of engineers.
Oculus Go (Score:1)
Solving the wrong problem (Score:1)
They're solving the wrong problem. How about: "How to fix a broken PR image"?
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I think they're already at cutting their losses in that branch. With good reason. They won't get anyone back who finally understood what they're doing, and they're not gonna lose anyone anymore who even now didn't get a clue.
wow (Score:2)
They sure sound chastened.
Trust (Score:3)
Not for the public ; a response to TPU (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like an answer to Google's TPU. Nothing like a general purpose CPU they'd want to sell to anyone, more like a dedicated piece of hardware to accelerate ultra common deep learning workloads (like, image recognition).
Just like Google, Facebook has to process immense volumes of images. GPUs are much more efficient at doing that than CPUs, but so there is still a bit of room for improvement when doing very specific tasks.
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Then why not buy/acqui-hire any one of the many startups building this kind of thing?
It is cheaper to just start their own project, and headhunt the skills from the startups, or from Google.
Designing something like the TPU is not difficult. It is basically just a slimmed down power-efficient GPU without the G. Just lots of parallel 8-bit multipliers repeated across the die over and over.
My prediction: Within 5 years, every new cell phone will have a built in dedicated matrix multiplication engine for AI.
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"The seventh stage of Facebook fatigue is being reduce to pressing ^V to post the same BIG DATA SLURPEE IN THE SKY kneejerk response everyone has already seen 1000 times.
Now 1001
End-to-end control of the user experience (Score:2)
This might be the scariest thing yet.
Maybe, at last, it is a strong enough reason for even the "sheeple" to finally walk away from this hideous data miner.
Nah...who am I kidding.
Is this really really naive? (Score:2)
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Sadly when companies say "they're making their own chips", 99% of the time is just "we're licensing the ARM ipcore, and slapping it together with several other licensed IP techs"
Spend a Billion to... (Score:3)
So Facebook will spend a billion to deliver what, exactly... a home internet speaker that will automatically post to Facebook pictures of my dinner, so I don't have to? Detect what TV shows I watch and give me automatic LIKEs for those? Listen to my phone calls and automatically "Friend" those people? Trick the Echo next to it into ordering random crap, so we get rid of it?
Hello (Score:1)