With cloud on the rise, Google has brought on board long-time Intel executive Uri Frank to head its custom chip division.

The tech giant is doubling down on its approach to custom chips. The Intel veteran will act as the Vice-President of Engineering for server chip design at Google.

“The future of cloud infrastructure is bright, and it’s changing fast. As we continue to work to meet computing demands from around the world, today we are thrilled to welcome Uri Frank as our VP of Engineering for server chip design,” Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and Vice-President of Systems Infrastructure, said in a blog post announcing the hire.

“Uri brings nearly 25 years of custom CPU design and delivery experience, and will help us build a world-class team in Israel. We’ve long looked to Israel for novel technologies including Waze, Call Screen, flood forecasting, high-impact features in Search, and Velostrata’s cloud migration tools, and we look forward to growing our presence in this global innovation hub. ” wrote Vahdat.

Frank’s last stint at Intel Corporation was as Corporate Vice-President, Design Engineering Group. GM Core & Client Development Group.

“I am excited to share that I have joined Google Cloud to lead infrastructure silicon design. Google has designed and built some of the world’s largest and most efficient computing systems. For a long time, custom chips have been an important part of this strategy. I look forward to growing a team here in Israel while accelerating Google Cloud's innovations in compute infrastructure,” wrote Frank on LinkedIn.

Google’s history in terms of building its own chips dates back to 2015 when it introduced the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips to customers. In 2018, it launched Video Processing Units (VPUs) and in 2019, it unveiled the OpenTitan, an open-source silicon root-of-trust project.

The tech giant now plans to move away from buying motherboard components from multiple vendors to building its own custom system on chip units.

“Compute at Google is at an important inflection point. To date, the motherboard has been our integration point, where we compose CPUs, networking, storage devices, custom accelerators, memory, all from different vendors, into an optimised system. But that’s no longer sufficient: to gain higher performance and to use less power, our workloads demand even deeper integration into the underlying hardware,” wrote Vahdat.

“Instead of integrating components on a motherboard where they are separated by inches of wires, we are turning to “Systems on Chip” (SoC) designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip, or on multiple chips inside one package. In other words, the SoC is the new motherboard,” added the post.

“We buy where it makes sense, build it ourselves where we have to and aim to build ecosystems that benefit the entire industry,” Vahdat further wrote.

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