Google Acquires Chip Maker Startup Agnilux

bobwrit points out a story at PC Magazine, from which he extracts "Google has purchased Agnilux, a secretive chip house made up of engineers who architected the heart of the iPad, then left the company. Reuters' PEHub reported the story Tuesday night. A Google spokesman also confirmed the acquisition to PCMag.com. 'We're pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don't have any additional information to share right now,' a Google spokesman said Tuesday night via email."

Comments

Lawsuit in the oven

[alfredos]

I can feel a lawsuit coming...

Re:Lawsuit in the oven

[TubeSteak]

I can feel a lawsuit coming...

Why?
If those guys didn't get sued after leaving Apple and starting their own company, why do you think Apple would have any legal grounds to come after them now?

Re:Lawsuit in the oven

[alfredos]

Why?

Apple probably doesn't care if they go on their own way and have a great success, say, making chips for controlling A/C units. But going to Google, whom they see as a big ship in collision course with them, can't end up in a happy "we're all friends" ending, can it?

Re:Lawsuit in the oven

[Clandestine_Blaze]

I thought such non-compete clauses were void in the state of California? I don't see how they could get sued.

Android

[Enderandrew]

Google wants to make phones, netbooks and tablets. They've been investing money in coding for ARM, but it makes sense to look into producing their own chips for these devices.

Re:Android

[Jeng]

With everyone saying ARM is so efficient how are we to know that Google is not investing in ARM to make more energy efficient ARM based servers?

Re:Android

[WrongSizeGlass]

Is Google branching out into too many areas? Phones, tablets, energy, fiber, etc ... and now chips? Makes me wonder if they are going to turn into a 'Jack of all trades'.

Re:Android

[MBGMorden]

Google's famous for being a risk taker. They try a ton of stuff and keep what seems to work. It keeps them fluid. The search engine game was good for them for a long time but they seem to get the hint that the way of the world is "innovate or die", so they're branching out. Gmail/Google Apps and the Android seem to be working out for them pretty well.

I think that this branching out is just a sign of a company doing the right thing and keeping active rather than resting on it's laurels.

Re:Android

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire reason that Google is so successful is that these ads ARE effective, and measurably so.

Re:Android

[poetmatt]

apparently nobody paid attention to the fact that every android phone runs on arm, aka google is already investing in ARM.

Re:Android

[feranick]

Very possible. Even Microsoft (of all software houses), may be thinking along the same lines in a recent job posting...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/20/2134213/Job-Ad-Hints-At-Microsoft-Move-To-ARM-Servers

Re:Android

[inKubus]

Seems smart. Why am I paying for (and paying to power) this Intel floating point unit when I'm only serving web pages?

But, Google's growth has been perpetuated by use of cheap commodity hardware, ie: profiting off the fact that the rest of us drive the price down by buying lots. A switch to specialized chips would mean a new direction for the company.

I mean, they could have done this from the beginning with fancy IBM or SUN or Unisys mainframe stuff, which typically allow you to configure IO subsystems (which is the main bottleneck of web serving). Likewise if they are doing database stuff you'd want a lot of RAM and wide I/O bandwidth, 128 bits or more. All standard for a long time on IBM stuff. But it's expensive, not commodity. Even Google's 100-300K servers (or maybe it's a million now, who knows) is not going to bring the scale of the whole worldwide market for Intel chips (100M plus annually).

So I don't see how this could benefit them long-term. Sure, power savings might add up to a lot so it's a good investment. And since they want to be the entire Internet (including your desktop), it's really a matter of energy over all else. But they are definitely going to need to keep adding hardware to keep growing, so that means higher chip expenses upfront. But, if they can spin the same processor into a little home or mobile computer to connect to their services, they might be able to start leveraging this scale thing again. But it seems to be a big risk to get into the manufacturing business.

Re:Android

[Areyoukiddingme]

What's even more amusing is that some of the seed capital that founded ARM Holdings came from.... Apple corporation.

Re:Android

[billcopc]

The reality is that Google is not a monolithic entity that does everything poorly. I don't think the search team has much to do with the Android team. They probably don't have many "jacks of all trades", but instead have many small, focused teams that are really good at what they do.

Just because they share the same brand name doesn't mean they all work out of one homogenous brain-pool.

Re:Android

[wealthychef]

He is talking about those that smear the inside of his underwear.

Did Google get the goods?

[StCredZero]

I wonder if Google just absconded with the real value in the chip company?

Re:Did Google get the goods?

[frank_adrian314159]

I don't actually believe that Apple lost a lot of momentum in this defection. In general, it's the folks who had alternative ideas for an architecture that didn't win out that tend to leave. I bet Google eventually gets stuck with something like a chip that has an insane pipeline structure, makes a different power/speed tradeoff (and probably for the worse), or has some other weird bag o'crap bolted to the side.

In addition, there are a *lot* of chip designers still left over from the chip manufacturer layoffs after the crashes of .com and bank that Apple can pick from. When you get right down to it, once the architecture is developed (and, by this, I don't only mean ISA, I also include things like clock/signal distribution, internal bus structure, pipelining strategy, cache structure, etc.) which only takes a small team - in fact, it works better with a small team - it's just moving little mask rectangles around with automated logic generation and, after that, a buttload of QA.

So, even if Apple sues, it's just because (a) Apple like using its lawyers and (b) it kicks Google in the nuts - it really doesn't mean much for Apple's future chip development.

Maybe Google feels theatened by Apple

[Orga]

Apple has a good handle on their vertical, from hardware to content. Google is just beginning its jump into the hardware portion. I imagine this is just another rung in the ladder from the bottom to the top, control all the way.

Re:Maybe Google feels theatened by Apple

[Nadaka]

Google has had their hands in some aspects of hardware for a while now. They have their own custom designed server motherboards.

Re:Maybe Google feels theatened by Apple

[Andy Dodd]

Um, Google didn't design that. HTC did. It's not very different at all from HTC's Windows Mobile products.

Even the Nexus One isn't a Google design - it's an HTC phone carrying Google branding. (Which is very common, HTC has ALWAYS been very rebranding-friendly, it is only very recently that you started seeing the HTC brand in the United States even though HTC phones have been in the USA for quite a while.)

"architected"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not know "architect" could be used as a verb. Let me try: Frank Gehry architects buildings for a living. Emperor Palpatine tried to architect the downfall of the rebels.

Re:"architected"?

[wonkavader]

How about...

"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."

Re:"architected"?

[StrategicIrony]

I just looked and the Oxford dictionary recognizes it, and points to archived letters from Keats in 1813 using the word as a verb.

It was considered an "overly formal" usage for awhile, but I think the use in computer-speak has brought it back toward mainstream.

Re:"architected"?

[grcumb]

"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."

Who said crime doesn't Pei?

One Word

[codepunk]

GPad

Re:One Word

[Hurricane78]

And then, about 5 years later, the WinPad.
Right with a “early experimental hacked together” OpenPad, which is only actually usable 5 years later,
and looks and behaves exactly like the WinPad with some missing smoothness, which itself behaves exactly like the GPad and iPad only a lot more annoying and with shitloads of security holes. ;)

Meanwhile in useful innovation land... nobody has ever heard of *Pads. ^^

Servers

[imgod2u]

Google has been spending a lot of effort -- from custom power structures inside their buildings to buying that magic box that generates power form minerals to custom-making their own server blades -- to reduce power and make energy efficient servers; they have so many of them after all.

These guys, while formerly PA Semi, focused their new business on energy-efficient server CPU's. So I wouldn't so much expect a gPad. It's likely the consumer will never see the chips that are being produced here.

Re:Servers

[MBGMorden]

It's also unlikely that Google would ever see a ROI from purchasing an entire semi-conductor company just to save a bit of money on the chips in their own servers. They're planning on marketing these to SOMEONE. They might be part of servers, or they might be part of a pad (I think Android-based pads are an inevitability myself - it's just a question of if these will power them or not). Heck they might be part of a set-top box or something else, but they are definitely planning on selling these chips as part of commercially marketable products.

I worry about robots

[jwhitener]

Now that Google is getting into hardware, it's only a matter of before we see:

    The Google Search (and destroy) Robot. ;)

Re:I worry about robots

[Nadaka]

Its ok, all you have to do is tattoo the following on your forehead and they won't bother you:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Different Take

[JackSpratts]

the times has a different spin. it's not chips so much as low-power hardware/software integration google's paying for. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/google-acquires-another-piece-of-the-tablet-puzzle/?hpw

Re:I don't really think it does

[Enderandrew]

Going back to my question, if this was feasible, why hasn't it been done before?

Re:I don't really think it does

[TheRaven64]

Because you need custom silicon. The people who make ARM SoCs are not in the server market. They'd need to design a new SoC for that market, and they'd then need to persuade system builders to use it. It's a lot more effort than just buying an off-the-shelf x86 chip and using that and it's a lot higher risk because you are assuming that there is a market for ARM-based servers. It makes sense for a company like Google, because they know there is a market for whatever hardware they produce; themselves. They can buy an A9 license from ARM, get some custom bits added to a SoC, and get a company that owns some fabs to run off a few hundred thousand of them, and it's worthwhile.

Re:Architected?

[Pulzar]

In ASIC world, to "design" means to write RTL code (and all that follows it) that matches the desired architecture. To "architect", means to write the high-level spec of what the design should look like.

It's not bullshit, it's the proper terminology for the topic at hand. You could argue that the terminology is lame or whatever, but it is what it is.