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by ohaideredevs 2496 days ago
Can you elaborate on this please, or link me? I am genuinely interested - do they build their own servers or something?

I know they lay down their own network cables.

2 comments

They certainly build their own networking gear (1) and their own TPU silicon, as well as laying down their own cables and even transatlantic cables (2). Then there are the pixel phones and laptops etc.

I cant readily find a link, but their rack-mount servers are I believe "custom" designs just for them (presumably done in-house too), although from what I know they use off-the-shelf CPUs from Intel and AMD (there was an announcement very recently that they were using Epyc now for example) & GPUs etc.

It would not surprise me if only the x86 CPUs & GPUs were the only external things they use, and I bet they're looking at their own custom ARM chips for certain workloads (like they use their custom TPUs for certain workloads).

1 - https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-reveals-secret-gear-con... 2 - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/google_dunant_cable...

The book "In The Plex" confirms your statements about them designing their servers in-house.

But they probably use standard chipsets.

You can see from recent news about speculation of backdoors in hardware that any sort of trust has to start from the bottom up.