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Google Moves From Search To Inventor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the leaping-the-gap dept.

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."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Google chips? by tygerstripes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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*

    --
    Meta will eat itself
    1. Re:Google chips? by Jasin+Natael · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
  2. You're forgetting one Manufacturer by hcob$ · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.
    --
    Cliff Claven
    K.E.G. Party Chairman
    Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
  3. Can Google invent AI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.