Google Moves From Search To Inventor

TubHarsh writes "The New York Times reports that Google continues to expand its scope from search engine to inventor. Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'. The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers."

Comments

Google chips?

[tygerstripes]

Now that does interest me. If they can show the same level of industrious innovation that they have in other fields, I'm excited about the impact this may have on the server-market, if nothing else.

I just hope that, if they are developing chips in-house (and if they are, I expect them to be cheap and powerful), they are less tight-fisted than they are with their other technical innovations. A new power-player in the CPU market would be great for us end-users

Seriously though, if they start manufacturing all their own hardware from scratch, they're probably going to be more independent than any major computer-based international in recent history. *exaggeration ends*

Re:Google chips?

[Jasin Natael]

Hmm... I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else. We're getting to the point where classical RDBMS systems are pretty well-understood, and the average RAID controller has a fair bit of hardware already. How far are we from having some relatively simple processor with an inflated L1 cache and high clock rate that does the heavy database work (including RAID/transaction logging) before it even reaches your machine?

It makes sense to do this, because database performance is big business -- just look at what some companies spend on licensing Oracle! As long as you're not worried about spatial queries, you could probably even get by without an FPU. There might be a lot of justification for this.

Re:Technology Incubator

[l3v1]

I think they're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, much like VCs do. But their doing it all in-house, hoping to come up with the next big thing. And the thing after that.

Well, if you want to innovate, or research, you have to do that. VCs don't do that, they just hope that the pack of people they give money won't just waste that money but actually come up with an idea that sticks to that wall. In-house research is not comparable with what VCs do with startups which usually base their entire future on one idea and if that fails, they fail. In research every idea that you prove is a failure is in fact a success since it gives you valueable knowledge and experience which you can use in the next trials if you have the money for it, and well, they have the money.

Secretive?

[kripkenstein]

They are indeed very secretive about their technology

Yes, so I thought. And indeed the article says, "Google is notoriously secretive about its technology", "Google will not comment on its costs". Yet Bill Gates is quoted as saying "Google doesn't have anything magic here. We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines.".

A web search doesn't turn up the reference for that quote (and the article doesn't link to it), so it's hard to know the context. But still, it does seem odd. How can Gates know such details, which are supposedly secret? I don't know whether to doubt the truth of his claim, or to wonder about how he could have found it out.

You're forgetting one Manufacturer

[hcob$]

Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'.

You're forgetting one Manufacturer: the NSA.

Can Google invent AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can Google become an artificial intelligence?
Google certainly has the data to whet the appetite of an AI Mind, but first Google would need an AI Engine such as Mind.Forth to impose order on the data, so that Google would not just store the data but would know the web of data.
Maybe Google will trigger a Technological Singularity.

Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe.

[CastrTroy]

But then just how many specialized chips does one need? With personal computers it's getting a little out of hand. First we have graphics processors, and now physics processors. Oh, and we also have network cards that allow you to offload the entire TCP/IP stack to their own processors. Oh, and sound cards have hardware mixers, so you don't have to mix the sound in software on your general purpose CPU. Oh, and those video capture cards convert everything to mpeg in hardware, so you don't need your CPU for that either. All I need is a special processor for compiling code, and I could go right back to using a 486 as my main processor, since it wouldn't have anything to do anymore.