Google Hires Intel Veteran Uri Frank To Design Cloud Server Chips

Google has hired Intel engineering veteran Uri Frank to lead new server chip design efforts as part of the cloud service provider’s increasing investments in custom silicon.

The tech giant is doubling down on its approach to custom chips. The Intel veteran will act as the Vice-President of Engineering for server chip design at Google.

“The future of cloud infrastructure is bright, and it’s changing fast. As we continue to work to meet computing demands from around the world, today we are thrilled to welcome Uri Frank as our VP of Engineering for server chip design,” Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and VP of systems infrastructure wrote in a blog post announcing the hire.

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With the hiring of a seasoned engineer from Intel to work on new server chips, Google Cloud is following the footsteps of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which are at different stages of developing and deploying processors in-house for new cloud instances. The moves are creating new competition for the cloud businesses of not only Intel but also x86 rival AMD, which expects the number of cloud instances using its EPYC CPUs to reach 400 by the end of the year.

With Frank, Google gets an experienced chip industry executive, who spent more than two decades at Intel rising from engineering roles to corporate vice president at the Design Engineering Group, his final role before leaving the company earlier this month.

Frank will lead the custom chip division in Israel as part of Google. As he said in his announcement on LinkedIn, this was a big step to join a company with a long history of building custom silicon.

“Google has designed and built some of the world’s largest and most efficient computing systems. For a long time, custom chips have been an important part of this strategy. I look forward to growing a team here in Israel while accelerating Google Cloud’s innovations in compute infrastructure,” Frank wrote.

The tech giant now plans to move away from buying motherboard components from multiple vendors to building its own custom system over chip units.

“Compute at Google is at an important inflection point. To date, the motherboard has been our integration point, where we compose CPUs, networking, storage devices, custom accelerators, memory, all from different vendors, into an optimized system. But that’s no longer sufficient: to gain higher performance and to use less power, our workloads demand even deeper integration into the underlying hardware,” wrote Vahdat.

“Instead of integrating components on a motherboard where they are separated by inches of wires, we are turning to “Systems on Chip” (SoC) designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip, or on multiple chips inside one package. In other words, the SoC is the new motherboard,” added the post.