Why Are So Many Companies Starting to Develop Their Own Chips?

Apple upgrades the M1 pro chip, Google pixel is equipped with self-talking chips, even cloud service providers like Alibaba are starting to carry chips

Through self-developed chips, technology giants can bring customers a better product or service experience, greatly save overall costs, and improve their own ability to resist risks.

Behind the development of chips by various technology giants, it is inseparable from the inherent advantages of the technology giants and several key changes in the upstream of the chip design industry.

Apple's first three generations of iPhone chip business were outsourced to Samsung, but the chip performance has not been up to expectations, prompting Apple to accelerate the formation of its own chip design team; Google developed a dedicated AI chip TPU for the cloud, because at that time it was difficult for the CPU to meet the demands of more and more applications for accelerating AI neural network operations.

These companies increasingly prefer to use customized chips instead of using the same chips as competitors to meet the specific needs of their products and applications.

This also allows them to have more control over the integration of software and hardware, while helping to stand out from the competition.

On the other hand, their own chips are cheaper than the market price. Products such as CPUs and dedicated AI chips independently developed by technology giants often have a smaller footprint and lower power consumption than general-purpose chips on the market.

The cost and area saved by each chip may be inconspicuous, but whether it is a data center server or a terminal product, when its scale is large enough, it will bring considerable economic benefits.