Google making own chips for 2023 Chromebooks – report

Google is preparing to make its own home-brewed processors for future Chromebook devices, according to a new report.

The company last month confirmed that it was getting into the homemade silicon game with the curious pre-announcement of its Pixel 6 smartphone line. The only real specification info we were given for these forthcoming flagship phones was that they would run on Google’s new Tensor chip.

If recent reports from Asia are to be believed, Google isn’t stopping there. Nikkei Asia claims to have it on good authority (three sources, in fact) that Google is developing its own ARM-based CPUs for future notebooks and tablets running on Chrome OS.

Or, as we more commonly know them, Chromebooks. Current Chromebooks like the Acer Chromebook 714 and the Google Pixelbook Go tend to run on Intel hardware, much like their Windows 10 counterparts.

According to the claims, these new Google Chromebook chips will hit the market some time in 2023.

It goes without saying that Google has received inspiration from Apple here. After dominating the smartphone performance rankings with its own A-series chips, Apple recently turned to supplanting Intel silicon in its Mac products, starting with the MacBook Air M1.

As the report points out, the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla are also known to be investing in their own semiconductor production. Controlling the hardware in this way will enable such companies to implement features relating to their specific products, rather than having to adapt around off-the-shelf components.

Of course, such production also massively increases R&D costs, whilst still being vulnerable to the same production bottlenecks that are blighting the wider tech industry.