Google announced today that it has appointed long-time Intel executive Uri Frank as vice president. Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and VP of systems infrastructure wrote in a blog post announcing the hire. “Google Cloud is turning to “Systems on Chip” (SoC) designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip, or on multiple chips inside one package. The SoC is the new motherboard,” wrote Vahdat in the same announcement.
Who is Uri Frank?
Uri brings nearly 25 years of custom CPU design and delivery experience. Uri was a corporate Vice President at Intel. Last month, Intel announced the promotion of six Israeli executives up the corporate ranks, with Frank being appointed corporate Vice President. Frank previously served as head of Intel’s Core & Client Development Group.
“I am excited to share that I have joined Google Cloud to lead infrastructure silicon design. Google has designed and built some of the world’s largest and most efficient computing systems. For a long time, custom chips have been an important part of this strategy. I look forward to growing a team here in Israel while accelerating Google Cloud’s innovations in compute infrastructure.”
The company introduced the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) in 2015. Without TPUs, offering many of our services such as real-time voice search, photo object recognition, and interactive language translation simply would not be possible. Three years later, Google launched Video Processing Units (VPUs) to enable video distribution to a range of formats and client requirements, supporting the rapid demand for real-time video communication scalably and effectively. Finally, the company unveiled OpenTitan, the first open-source silicon root-of-trust project and developed custom hardware solutions from SSDs, to hard drives, network switches, and network interface cards.
