Today, Google announced the first Arm-based CPU for data centers, likely in response to Amazon’s Arm chips powering the giant’s data centers.
Google’s chip is called Axion, and it’s designed using Arm’s Neoverse V2 CPU. Google says Axion performs 30% better than the fastest Arm-based general-purpose instances available for cloud computing today, and is 50% more performant and 60% more energy efficient than “comparable current x86-based instances.” %. .
Soon, Google services such as BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine and the YouTube advertising platform will use Axion. That’s a good fit once you consider that Axion offers “a huge leap in performance” for web and application servers, containerized microservices, open source databases, in-memory caching, data analytics engines, media processing, and general-purpose CPU-based workloads. It’s obviously good. AI training and inference,” the company said.
The foundation of Axion is Titanium, which Google describes as a system composed of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and layered scale-out offloads responsible for platform operations such as networking and security, so the Axion processor itself has greater capacity and Higher performance.
Arm CEO Rene Haas said:
Google’s new Axion CPU marks a major milestone in delivering custom silicon optimized for Google’s infrastructure and built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform. Decades of ecosystem investment, coupled with Google’s continued innovation and open source software contributions, ensure the best experience for customers’ most important workloads wherever they run Arm.
Google Cloud customers will be able to use Axion in services such as Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow and Cloud Batch, while Arm-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. The Axion is scheduled to actually launch “later this year,” but no further details have been revealed yet.
source