Microsoft offers electrical engineers a lifeline as it pursues custom cloud silicon

As custom silicon plays an ever-larger role in the cloud, Microsoft is more and more openly gearing up to design its own homegrown datacenter-grade chips. It's long been rumored and whispered that the Windows giant is working on its own processors for servers as well as personal devices. Google and Amazon are doing the same …

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I would like to say something nice about Microsoft...

Oh wait, it's 25 years to late to do that, Microsoft thinks that we're all lunch these days.

[Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward]

WTF?

What the heck does an electrical engineer have to do with chip and processor design? Other than a few electrons?

It's hard to think of two engineering disciplines that are further removed from each other.

[martinusher]

Re: WTF?

Most people don't know that most logic design is done inside a computer. There is a hardware element, though, because hardware design is by its nature imperfect, there are alll sorts of timing constraints that need to be understood and managed and the chip pinout and power/grounding is also a bit of an artform. They're also going to need people who know how to bring up and test silicon and write drivers for the various peripherals.

(The idea's attractive, though, because they can really enforce customer lock in if they own key pieces of hardware.)

What Microsoft is really saying, though, is something like "Come to work for us, we desperately need you. Ignore what happened to those once desperately needed but now redundant programmers."