Slashdot Mirror
Facebook To Design Its Own Processors For Hardware Devices, AI Software, and Servers (bloomberg.com)
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.
What Zuckerberg really wants to do is bake spyware right into the CPU so it can collect data on you in a totally unimpeachable, nigh-unto undetectable way.
DO NOT WANT.
Well, knowing Facebook, it will be the processor that steals everything about you and markets it at an ever faster rate.
NOW could care less what FB says, does or
Testifies
and this new vacuum can suck on my balls
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 nothing in there you didn't want. The next step of course is fabbing that chip yourself under highly controlled conditions. You keep your initial design direction under your hat, and you have some confidence that nothing else was introduced somewhere in the burn-to-silicon steps.
That particular shit storm has been brewing for a decade. Part of the faster-better-stronger globalist narrative that supported off-shoring of critical industrial and IP practices may be beginning to fall apart.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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.
They're solving the wrong problem. How about: "How to fix a broken PR image"?
They sure sound chastened.
I Trust Huawei far more than I trust Facebook.
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.
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.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Or am I naive in thinking that this is really really hard to do and is bound to fail expensively?
E Proelio Veritas.
"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
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
They're developing the vacuum from J. Edgar Hoover's wet dreams.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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"
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?
-Dave Haynie
Facebook has to process immense volumes of images.