Posted on Thursday, April 22 2010 @ 20:55 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
ARS Technica
writes Google has bought AgniLux, a new chip startup that was rumored to be working on an energy-efficient server chip. It's unknown what Google intends to do with the purchase, but it could be that the search giant bought the firm for help with porting Chrome and Android onto other devices, like tablets or even TV set-top boxes.
Last night peHub reported that Google has bought stealth-mode hardware startup AgniLux for an undisclosed sum, and Google confirmed the purchase today. AgniLux was started by members of the P.A. Semi team who jumped ship shortly after Apple bought the company in 2008, and was rumored to be working on some kind of energy-efficient server processor.
The purchase has occasioned some speculation that Google might start making its own server processors in-house, or that the company might be looking to compete outright with Apple by making an A4-killer and putting it into a tablet. The former is unlikely, and the latter is certainly wrong. While it's a virtual certainty that someone, somewhere within Google is paying very close attention to the possibility that ARM-based products may soon make for decent server parts, there would have to be a really compelling performance/watt case for Google to go to the expense of fabbing a boutique ARM design in the kinds of relatively low volumes that it would use for its datacenters.
