Google Openly Admits That AI-Powered Functionality is More Important Than Hardware Prowess for Pixel Phones, and the Company is Happy With the Results
Monika Gupta works as a senior director of product management for Google Silicon Teams and gets “to focus on what [Google] need[s] five years from now” for its chips. The interview mainly revolved around how the in-house approach helps the silicon team working closely with Google’s AI researchers to “know exactly where machine learning models are trending in five years.” In addition to that, the podcast also had a section on the Tensor team’s opinion on benchmarks and what Pixel phones are focusing on instead. Google has said that it is “perfectly comfortable” with not winning or leading the benchmarks as it is focusing on prioritizing end-user experience that originates from the chip decisions that the company has made. They may tell some story, but we don’t feel like they tell the complete story. And so for us what we benchmark are the actual software workloads that we are running on our chip and then we strive with every generation of tensor chip to make them better, whether it’s better quality, better performance, lower power. Needless to say, this approach clearly showcases that Google is valuing artificial intelligence more than raw hardware prowess, and it would be interesting to see how this philosophy goes forward. Will we see a day when Tensor chipsets can finally rival the likes of Apple and Samsung? Gupta was asked about the silicon roadmap as well, and she talked about how the goal is to ensure that Tensor supports ambient computing. There is no denying that Google is showing promising ambitions, but at the end of the day, they are just ambitions, and we are not sure how long it is going to take AI to catch up to actual hardware prowess that is found in the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple chips. I would say we build upon that vision of ambient computing and figure out how to do super complex, nuanced things in the chip in a power-efficient way that are going to unlock some of those ambient computing experiences.
