After Apple’s Google Amazon, Facebook Has To Make Its Own Chips.

The ranks of the tech giants who have developed their own chips have grown again. This time they joined Facebook.


According to Bloomberg, Facebook is currently setting up a chip  R&D team that will develop chips for Facebook’s future hardware  products.


More importantly, it will greatly reduce Facebook's reliance on traditional chip vendors such as Intel and Qualcomm.


Facebook is mainly looking for R&D personnel who are responsible  for the "end-to-end SoC/ASIC and supporting firmware and drivers."  According to its official website's recruitment list, this recruitment  work is still at an early stage.


SoC refers to the system-level chip, and ASIC is the abbreviation for  "Application Specific Integrated Circuit". At the same time, it also  indicates that the chip that Facebook will study for itself is designed  for special purposes.


According to AndroidPolice, it is very likely that Facebook will use its own chips for the first time in its smart speakers.


As  early as last month, there were reports that Facebook was developing  its own smart speaker and was named Facebook Potal. Its function was  similar to that of Amazon’s Echo Show and Echo Spot, and it also had a  camera for video calls. Also supports facial recognition.


Amazon  is already planning to use its own chips for home Echo products. This  self-developed chip will allow Echo to accept and respond to user's  instructions even when offline. Facebook is also likely to want to Smart speakers have similar features.


Of course, this smart speaker will integrate depth in the Facebook  ecosystem, and the original plan is that the information about Facebook  users will be stored on the Facebook server.


However, due to the recent Facebook privacy scandal, the tech giant  agreed to store the information collected by the smart speaker products  locally. Due to privacy issues, the smart speaker that Facebook  originally planned to launch had to be postponed.


Before  Facebook, Apple began to use its self-developed chips as early as 2010,  including A-series processors on iOS devices and W1 chips on AirPods,  and there are rumors that Apple will let them Computer products also use their own processors.


Another  tech giant, Google, is also actively developing its own processor. At  last year's launch of Google Pixel 2, it already used a self-developed  chip, but this chip is designed to handle heavy image computing. Of course, Google also independently developed the AI chip, which is TPU.


Technology  giants make their own chips, in addition to getting rid of the control  of traditional chip makers and reducing costs, a chip customized  according to their own products can be better adapted and tuned.