Meta is planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
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?
Ok… Why is it surprising?
Because building a chip design branch is a very large undertaking.
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?