Google Is Reportedly Doing Chip Design And Looks For Partners To Make A More Competitive Android
Google reportedly is doing chip design or develop a series of chips with hardware partners to be able to standardize Android and make it computationally competitive with Apple, said AppleInsider.
Yet, the effort is considered by the chip industry as a long shot. Reports for The Information by Amir Efrati detailed Google's concepts for making Android to be more competitive.
A company giving signs that it takes care to enhance its products is great. As Google wanting to be like Apple, TechAeris thinks that the Android owner does not have such intention, but to try to improve user experience by adding new Android features.
Apple rapidly expanded its customization of its Application Processors that power its iPads and iPhones, which enabled deep integration between how the iOS platform works with the hardware on which it runs.
Google's Android has a broad hardware fragmentation across various processors, cameras, sensors and mobile baseband chips which possibly prevents the Internet titan to quickly roll out competitive functionality.
Efrati wrote that talks with chipmakers had Google in particular, is doing chip design, wanting more sophisticated camera processing like faster photo capture or constantly record the environment and send Google images for cloud-based analysis. Another thing is an enhanced motion processor, more onboard processor memory and add-in infrared sensors for measuring distance.
As for Google's attempt at doing chip design and turn chipmakers into commodity producers is an aggressive concept. Any attempt to control chipmakers and dictate its own specs may expand the scope of its antitrust investigations both in Europe and in the U.S.
"Persuading chip makers to use designs put forward by Google seems like a long shot to people in that industry," the report noted.
"The top vendors, such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, are likely to value their own technology over IP developed by others, either because they make money from licensing their own tech; they don't want to depend on a third party like Google; or they wouldn't want to churn out a product that might be identical to one that's produced by other Google partners."
