this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The metaverse silicon team? Money really was too cheap in the pandemic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is it really surprising that a massive company investing billions into a nascent technology would develop in-house chips for it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because building a chip design branch is a very large undertaking.

  • Chips are expensive to design
  • Expensive to manufacture
  • you need to buy millions and millions of them
  • the lifecycle of a chipset has a much longer tail than their metaverse attempt

It's surprising because they invested all that money on a product they don't know is going to take off (metaverse) and the chips won't be ready for a very long time.

What kind of chip are they even building? There are massive corporations that have spent a very long time building performance, low power cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung) but instead of buying from them they want to reinvent the wheel.

It's surprising because Facebook thinks they can catch up to the other chip design companies which takes an enormous amount of investment over decades. It's not a 1, 2, or 5 year thing.

So, now I'm curious. Can you please explain why you think this is a very normal and unsurprising thing for Facebook to try and do?

Also, are you even a chip designer? Are you even an engineer at all?