American multinational technology company Google has hinted at big changes that are underway for the upcoming versions of Pixel phones. As per reports, the tech giant is hiring Apple architects to work on its own customized chips for the said smartphone lineups.
Manu Gulati, an Apple micro-architect, who has worked on the company’s chip development for almost eight years, has joined Google. He announced this news on his Linkedin profile on Wednesday. Gulati joins Google under a completely new designation, ‘Lead SoC Architect’.The tech giant presently depends on third-party chips for all of their products. While Google Next uses a chip by Texas instrument, the current Pixel phones use Qualcomm.
Another reason behind the speculation of Google developing its own chips has been developed from the fact that the tech giant has put on a number of SoC-related job offers, most of them being specific to smartphones, including “Mobile SoC Memory Architect”, “Mobile SoC CPU Architect” and “Hardware Engineer, Mobile SoC Architect”, as per The Verge.
The company in the past has relied on chips designed and manufactured by Qualcomm when the first Pixel phones debuted last year in 2016. It is the same chip that is used in Asus, LG, HTC and Lenovo. Overtime, Qualcomm has become the de-facto developer for higher end Android smartphone chips. This has resulted in making the situation difficult for companies to differentiate their product from one another.
It is being said that where on one hand, hiring Gulati could give an edge to Google over its rival companies, losing him, on the other end, is a significant blow for Apple.
However, it is not the first time that Google’s intention for developing its own chips has surfaced online. In 2015, the multi-million dollar company was in talks with chip developers about manufacturing Google-designed chips. Also, last year, Google planned to gradually power Pixel devices with its own microchips.