Social network is reportedly designing custom silicon to optimize the handling of certain types of workloads.
Facebook is jumping on the bandwagon of large-scale service providers developing their own chips to power the data centers driving their services. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all reportedly spend millions of dollars to design highly-tuned custom silicon optimized to serve the requirements of their particular applications. Facebook has now reportedly joined the party too, and is developing a chip that powers machine learning for tasks such as recommending content to users, The Information quotes several people apparently familiar with the project.
