And thus, the fun continues. A few years ago, Apple bought PowerPC processor company PA Semi, whose technology, some claim, ended up in Apple’s A4 processor. Some PA Semi people, however, left Apple shortly after the acquisition, opting to found a new start-up company instead. This company, Agnilux, has now been bought by Google.
The interesting part about this whole thing is that nobody really knows what Agnilux was working on, since it was a so-called stealth start-up. The New York Times tried to find out what Agnilux was working on earlier this year, and they came away with very little. “Some kind of server” – that’s as far as they got.
“We want to make a splash,” Mark Hayter, the chief operating officer at Agnilux, told The New York Times, “We don’t want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we’re ready.” In other words, we have no clue as to what these guys are building.
As for who’s on file working there, it’s not a bad list. We’ve got some of the PA Semi brains, as well as a number of people from Cisco. Then there’s Scott Redman, the director of application software, who used to work at TiVo as a software architect. Google could very well plan to move into the hardware business, or it’s just a simple case of the people being valuable.
We’ll have to wait and see.
it seems Google has too much money to spend acquiring companies.
He also negotiate ITA Software acquisition
http://goo.gl/zns4
*gets pop corn*
start a company just to sell it. Reminds me of a “The Simpsons” episode where Homer starts an internet company. Bill Gates comes by and buys it even though he says he doesn’t know what the company does.
Anyone want to buy my one-man shop?
although when Bill Gates states he’s going to “buy him out” in means his muscle comes in to smash the company up. Simpson’s Bill Gates “I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques”
High speed internet router/cloud/storage appliance.
I suspect that google is looking at a new platform to run the apps on.
Considering that many people have finally wised up on the atom (its performance per watt is only OK) I think that google may be looking at making some extremely dense power/performance/space servers.
An example would be that ARM systems arent very fast even at 2 Ghz BUT you can make one with 2GB RAM fit in a 4″x4″ space fairly easily and draw 4W which is 20 devices in a standard rack/cabinet or just 80 watts and 40Ghz of ARM CPU in 1U.
Given that Google doesnt like to spend 10,000 on each server I doubt quad 8 core intel cpus are on the table. sure, you can get 48Ghz of intel cpu in 1U (rather 96GHz in a 2U with 4x 8 core), the power requirements for a system like this are in the KW.
who knows, we may see a multi core, multi cpu embeded platform from google or even a google manufactured smartphone or even routers.
Ghz do not multiply. Sparc and Arm probably have the best proformace per watt for a server workload while sparc would have better throughput. PPC is more number crunching targeted usually.