> Apple have been really smart in the last decade in buying up really good chip development teams and that is experience that is really hard to find.

They can outsource silicon development. Should not be a problem with their money.

In comparison to dotcom development teams, semi engineering teams are super cheap. In Taiwan, a good microelectronics PhD starting salary is USD $50k-60k...

Opportunity cost, though.

Experienced teams who have designed high performance microarchitectures aren't common, because there just isn't that much of that work done.

And when you're eventually going to spend $$$$ on the entire process, even a 1% optimization on the front end (or more importantly, a reduction of failure risk from experience!) is invaluable.

Does Google have a silicon team?

As of a year and a half ago they had over 300+ people across Google working on silicon (RTL, verification, PD, etc) that I’m aware of.

They created TPU's right? So somewhere inside the alphabet group they must have some expertise

It wouldn't surprise me. They've been designing custom hardware for some time. Look at the Pluto switch and the "can we make something even more high performance" or "we can make it simpler, cheaper, more specialized and save some watts" (which in turn saves on power for computing and power for cooling costs).

At the scale that Google is at, it really wouldn't surprise me if they were working on their own silicon to solve the problems that exist at that scale.

Pluto is merchant silicon in a box, like all their other switches.

"""Regularly upgrading network fabrics with the latest generation of commodity switch silicon allows us to deliver exponential growth in bandwidth capacity in a cost-effective manner."""

https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183...

I wasn't intending to claim that Pluto is custom silicon but rather that Pluto is an example of Google looking for simplicity, more (compute) power, and less (electrical) power.

The next step in that set of goals for their data center would be custom silicon where merchant silicon doesn't provide the right combination.

Manu Gulati - a very popular Silicon Engineer who worked at Apple left for Google. (He now works at Nuvia with other ex-Apple stalwarts)

They have Norman Jouppi, he apparently was involved in the TPU design.

What are TPUs and quantum computers made of? ;)