Google appoints ex-IBM chip designer as Chief Architect of ‘next-gen core’

Anthony Saporito has joined Google as Chief Architect to work on a next-gen CPU core. Saporito spent more than twenty years at IBM as a chip designer on various chips for IBM’s Z mainframes.

Saporito has his appointment self-published on LinkedIn† In his own words, he will be part of an “incredibly talented team” of industry veterans. At IBM, the chip designer had the title of distinguished engineer & master inventor. Among other things, he worked on the 7nm Telum AI chip that IBM announced last year. According to The Stack has saporito 115 patents to his credit with regard to chip design. They are owned by IBM.

Last month it turned out that a designer of IBM Power cores has made the switch to Google. DQ Nguyen spent 36 years with the IBM Systems and Technology Group designing cores based on the IBM Power microarchitecture. Nguyen has several publications to his name on cores from Power6 to Power9† In the Google team he has been appointed as cpu performance microarchitecture lead.

Early last year, Google hired Intel veteran Uri Frank to lead a team working on server SOCs. The search giant has been developing its own chips for years. For example, Google makes its own Tensor socs with Tensor Processing Units to speed up AI calculations. It is not known exactly what the ‘next-gen cores’ will be used for.

Google TPU v3