Google is Designing its Own Processors. Of Course It Is (Premium)

A new report claims that Google could use its own custom microprocessors in Pixel handsets and Chromebooks by 2021. The too-obvious comparison here is Apple, makes its own A-series microprocessors. But this is about much more than Apple envy.

“Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year, and eventually Chromebooks as well, a report in Axios claims. “The move … would be a blow to Qualcomm, which supplies processors for many current high-end phones, including the Pixel.”

That part isn’t true: Google’s smartphone business is negligible and is inarguably failing, as I’ve already noted. Qualcomm won’t even notice if the Pixel business disappears. Which, let’s be honest, it probably will.

But Google’s expansion into processor design is still interesting on many levels. I’ve written a lot in the past about how personal computing platform makers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been expanding into custom chipset design, both to differentiate their products and to make their software integrate more seamlessly with their hardware. And it’s impossible to have this discussion without raising the specter of that infamous Alan Kay quote once again.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware,” Alan Kay said in way back in 1982, inspiring acolyte Steve Jobs in ways that still impact us all today. At the time, Kay was referring to PCs: In those days, the personal computing market was in a state of disarray, with numerous incompatible hardware and software designs.

But in recent years, Kay’s quote has served as a different kind of inspiration: With the personal computing market long standardized on just a few dominant platforms—a situation that has remained consistent as the market evolved from PCs to smartphones—the makers of those platforms have differentiated their offerings by designing their own hardware components too.

This was initially mostly about custom chipsets like Apple’s H, T, U, and W chips, Google’s Pixel Visual Core, and Microsoft’s Pixelsense Accelerator chip. Those chipsets work in tandem with a device’s microprocessor, much like graphics processors do, offloading work to hardware that is specifically designed to perform specialized tasks.

But with Apple seeing great success with the ARM-based A-series processors that power its iPhone, iPad, and other devices, its competitors are now trying to emulate the quirky corporation yet again.

This isn’t new, per se: The biggest Android handset makers, like Samsung and Huawei, already design their own custom ARM chipsets, though Samsung, in particular, only supplies them in devices sold in certain markets. And last year, Microsoft began working with all of its chip-making partners—AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm—to create customized versions of their microprocessors for its own PCs. The first-generation versions of these products aren’t particularly impressive, but one imagines they will improve over time.

And now Google is getting into this game as well. Very interesting.

According to Axios, the Google microprocessor—really a System on a Chip, or SoC design, but I’m trying to keep things simple here—is codenamed Whitechapel. It was co-designed with Samsung, not Qualcomm, and is expected to use a state of the art 5 nm manufacturing process. (Samsung manufactures Apple’s A-series chipsets, but I don’t believe they play a role in their design.)

The Whitechapel processors won’t appear in Pixel handsets until at least 2021, and I’m wondering now whether this schedule played a role in the rumors about Google using mid-level Qualcomm Snapdragon processors in its Pixel 5 family of handsets, which is due in late 2020. Those chipsets will cost a lot less than the usual Snapdragon flagship chipsets it uses, which could help lower Google’s losses until its own chipsets are ready. And yes, Google clearly loses money on Pixel: This business being unsustainable clearly played a role in its decision to design its own chips.

As for differentiation, Whitechapel will allegedly be optimized for Google’s machine-learning technologies and the “always-on” capabilities of Google Assistant, Axios claims. Future versions could be used to power future-generation Pixel Chromebooks.

Ultimately, all this is, is Google taking a last stand in hardware: If these efforts don’t pay off, there are no more cost savings to be had. But like Microsoft, Google needs an experienced partner, in this case Samsung, to help pull this off. And in designing its own chips, Google will introduce complexity and costs of its own. I don’t think the firm could survive another generation of unreliable handsets.

Put simply, this move is as risky as it is obvious and even inevitable.