Adobe is Considering Whether it Wants To Design Its Own Chips (axios.com)

A growing number of technology companies are trying to manufacture their own chips, cutting their reliance on Intel and other chip providers. This week Adobe pondered making a similar move. From a report: At an internal innovation conference on Tuesday, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis posed the matter as a question for his colleagues, noting the significant increases in performance from chips designed specifically for specialized tasks, like machine learning. "Do we need to become an ARM licensee?" he said, referring to the company whose underlying chip design is used across a wide range of devices, including computers, servers and phones.

"I don't have the answer, but it is something we are going to have to pay attention to." Later on Tuesday, Parasnis told Axios that there are a range of ways that Adobe could get deeper into silicon. "ARM does afford a model for a software company to package its technology much closer to silicon," he said, adding Adobe could do that without literally making its own chips, including by partnering with an existing chipmaker.

Comments

Dubyah Tee Eff?

[Crypto Gnome]

Seriously, WHAT FOR?

The entire "lets design the silicon ourselves" push is because YOU'RE ALREADY USING SILICON, just paying someone else for 100% of the work, and the design is generic not customized for your use-case.

If you're a company which has NO HARDWARE PRODUCTS (not even rumors on the horizons) thinking "hey maybe we should license ARM, it worked for Apple" is the WORST KIND OF CORPORATE DRUG INDUCED NIGHTMARE.

Re:Dubyah Tee Eff?

[Sarten-X]

For just about anybody else, I'd agree with you... For Adobe, though, it kinda makes sense.

Adobe's cash cow is the media industry, and one of their biggest performance bottlenecks is video rendering. While not a particularly large market, having a premium hardware product that improves rendering speed is worth quite a lot of money to certain companies. I expect that's what Adobe is looking to capture with this push, with a model that would look very similar to how Bitcoin miners operated: Plug in an ASIC as a coprocessor, and it will handle the application workload.