A "search service industry" is how most engineers in the electronics industry would have described Google Inc of the US until only a few years ago. Today though, few people are unaware that Google has stepped into the digital consumer electronics field. Mobile phone operator T-Mobile USA Inc of the US released the T-Mobile G1 mobile phone, developed by HTC Corp of Taiwan, on October 22, 2008. The G1 mounts Android, the mobile phone platform developed by Google.
Google has established
a corporate philosophy for organizing the information of the world and
making it available to all. To achieve their goal, the firm utilizes
one of the most powerful computing environments in the world, providing
diverse services to terminals of all kinds. The enormous structure is
nothing less than a giant machine.
The core of the machine is the millions of servers on which Google runs. This collection of servers is what provides the firm's many services as Web applications. The company recently launched a service called "App Engine," in fact, making some of that computing power available to external developers.
Client-side components designed to utilize these various services, data, etc, are also being readied. One representative example is Android. As a general-purpose embedded operating system (OS), it is on the verge of entering not only mobile phones, but also car navigation systems, televisions and more.
A new component has just been added to the client side: Chrome, a Web browser developed by Google. Chrome is designed as a platform to execute Web applications on a personal computer (PC), and is the final core component needed to complete the machine.
The appearance of
Chrome has additional significance, though; its true value lies in its
internal high-performance JavaScript engine, called V8.
Services provided via the Internet are utilized, in principle, as Web applications, and V8 is the "main engine" handling execution.
At present, V8 only runs on Chrome, but there is already an ARM version. Once V8 is successfully ported to Android, it will be possible for a wide range of embedded systems to enjoy all the benefits of the "Google machine."
by Toshiyuki Omori, Phil Keys
Cover Story：Runaway Evolution of Google Engine - table of contents
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