Facebook Is Working On Building Its Own Chips

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Facebook will soon be competing against other tech giants soon; the company is working hard on developing its own silicon chips to power its hardware ambitions.

It’s not just cryptocurrency that Facebook is interested in. The tech giant is also very intent on creating its own hardware – with its own silicon. It started building the team that will make this happen earlier in the year, but its latest addition comes straight from Google. Shahriar Rabii is now Vice President and Head of Silicon. Facebook is ready to develop its own chips.

Facebook needs to rely on its own chips to power its hardware ambitions. So, it’s working on building its own.

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For its grand plans to take over the world, Facebook, just like Apple and Google, will need to rely on its own chips – not Intel and Qualcomm. Apple has been building its own processors for its devices for the better part of a decade and has also created chips for AI recently. The company plans to go Intel-free by 2020. Even Amazon has started to design its own chips to lead its AI efforts. Google already creates its own Visual Core chips for its Pixel devices, and Rabii was part of the team that built those. We’ve known about Facebook’s hardware efforts for some time, and we know it’s not working on a smartphone.

What would Facebook use its custom silicon chips for? VR, AI?

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Facebook’s chips would be used in something else – perhaps a new VR device? Oculus VR used a Qualcomm chip in its standalone Oculus Go headset, so it may want to make itself independent of the chip-maker in later versions. Apart from that, the company may be using the chips to help its AI content-policing efforts. At the moment it uses modified Nvidia GPUs for this purpose.