UPDATED 15:09 EDT / SEPTEMBER 01 2021

INFRA

Google reportedly developing laptop chips as Chromebook sales surge

Google LLC is developing custom central processing units for Chromebooks, Nikkei Asia reported today.

The report, which cited three sources familiar with the matter, also contained other new details about the search giant’s consumer hardware roadmap. Most notably, Google is said to be developing CPU technology for tablets, which suggests that it may be looking to return to the tablet market it exited in 2019.

Another newly reported detail relates to Google’s smartphone business. The company is said to be expecting strong demand for the upcoming Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones, the newest additions to its Android handset series. Google is reportedly preparing 50% more smartphone production capacity than in 2019, when Pixel sales reached a record with more than 7 million units shipped.

Google’s laptop business, the focus of its newly reported CPU development effort, is seeing strong growth. The company provides a lightweight operating system for laptops called Chrome OS that ships both with Google-branded computers and machines made by hardware partners. Sales of Chromebooks, as Chrome OS-powered systems are known, surged by an estimated 68% in the second quarter to more than 12 million units.

Consumers’ growing adoption of Chromebooks may be one of the factors behind Google’s reported decision to build custom laptop CPUs. 

Developing a custom CPU is a major endeavor. It’s estimated that designing a chip based on the latest five-nanometer manufacturing technology carries a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Google’s reported decision to make such a major commitment indicates that the company expects a custom chip could help sustain the rapid growth in Chromebook sales.

Specifically, the search giant may be hoping that switching to custom CPUs could enable it to build laptops with better performance than machines based on Intel Corp. silicon. That’s the approach Apple Inc. has taken. Apple claims that the custom CPU in the newest MacBooks can outperform a comparable Intel chip by as much as 3.5 times in some cases.

The CPUs will reportedly be based on chip designs from Arm Ltd. Arm’s chip designs form the basis of most smartphone processors. They’re used in a variety of other systems as well, such as sensors and data center gear.

No further technical details are available about Google’s reported CPUs. However, it’s possible that the processors will share some features with the custom Tensor chip in Google’s upcoming Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones. Apple based the M1 chip in new MacBook laptops on the same design as the latest iPhone’s processor. 

For Google, reusing chip design elements from Pixel phones could be a convenient way of reducing CPU engineering costs. 

Chromebooks and Pixel phones have certain technical overlaps that might ease the task of reusing chip components. Notably, both Chromebooks and smartphone chips require the ability to operate with a high degree of power efficiency and without the need for an active cooling system such as a fan. In contrast, adapting a processor design that does require an active cooling system to a laptop without one would be a much more challenging task.

There’s a possibility that Google’s laptop CPUs will feature, or be packaged together with, a processing module optimized for artificial intelligence. The Tensor chip in the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro has dedicated AI circuits. Other chipmakers are building AI-optimized circuits directly into their consumer CPUs: Intel Corp.’s recently debuted Alder Lake CPUs feature a module capable of performing some machine learning operations nearly eight times faster than the company’s earlier silicon.

Google gained a considerable amount of experience developing AI-optimized silicon while building out its data center infrastructure. The company offers custom AI chips called Tensor Processing Units through its public cloud and also uses them internally.

It’s notable that Google is said to be preparing custom CPU technology for tablets alongside the planned laptop chips. Google discontinued its last Chrome OS tablet, the Pixel Slate, in 2019. Today’s report would seem to suggest that the company is planning a return to the segment, which would create more competition for Apple’s market-leading iPad.

Google is expected to roll out the custom CPUs in 2023. 

Photo: Google Coral

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