Google Executives Succeed, How Far Can Facebook Go On Homemade Chips?

For months, there have been rumors that Facebook wants to make chips on its own. Now, this social networking company really wants to do that. Bloomberg reported Friday that Facebook has successfully attracted a senior engineer from Google to lead Facebook's chip research.

Shahriar Rabii is the former engineering director of Google silicon department. According to his LinkedIn introduction, he will be vice president and director of silicon department in Facebook. It is not clear why he wants to make chips.

According to Bloomberg reports, the Google team led by Rabii has made Google's chips for many devices, including Visual Core chips in Pixel. Pixel's impressive photography function owes to a certain extent to the chip. According to 9to5Google's report, Rabii has also been involved in the research of server security chip Titan.

Facebook seems unlikely to let Rabii continue to study cell phone chips as Google did. Facebook has gone through a similar route, but the result is not ideal. However, processing power can provide services to social networks and many other business sectors in various potential areas.

The first is Oculus, a virtual reality company. As early as 2014, Facebook bought Oculus at a price of $2 billion, but so far, it has not yet fully understood how the company should develop. According to Bloomberg, Rabii will work under the leadership of Facebook virtual reality and Andrew Bosworth, director of augmented reality. The Oculus Go launched earlier this year, though affordable, is not satisfactory, and it still relies on Qualcomm chips. Perhaps Facebook believes that it is valuable to create its own chips for future models.

In addition, Facebook processes large amounts of data every day. The company relies on algorithms to monitor all kinds of potential irregularities on its platform, including hate speech and spam. According to Verge, most of these processes depend on the modified GPU server driven by NVIDIA. If there is a dedicated processor customized for such tasks, the effect may be better.

No matter what kind of research Facebook has made Rabii, the company seems to be very serious about this matter. As early as April, Facebook released recruitment information to build its own chip manufacturing team. At present, the leadership of this project is at least in place.