Strategically, could this be part of a response to Apple silicon?
Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:
- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;
- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.
I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.
Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:
- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;
- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.
I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.