Google has just announced its first Arm-based CPU for data centres, likely in response to Amazon’s Arm chips powering its giant data centres.
The new chip from Google is called Axion and is designed with Arm’s Neoverse V2 CPU. Google claims that Axion performs 30% better than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances currently available for cloud computing. Additionally, it boasts 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency compared to “comparable current-generation x86-based instances.”
In the near future, Google services such as BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube advertising platform will all utilise Axion. Google states that Axion delivers “huge leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, container microservices, open-source databases, in-memory, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training, and distraction.”
Axion is built on titanium, a system of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and layered scaling offloads that handle platform operations like networking and security. This allows Axion processors to have more capacity and improved performance.
Arm CEO Rene Haas commented on the announcement:
Google’s announcement of the new Axion CPU is an important milestone in delivering custom silicon optimised for Google’s infrastructure, built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform. Decades of ecosystem investment, combined with Google’s continuous innovation and open-source software contributions, ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to customers running anywhere on 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. Arm-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. Axion is expected to be available “later this year,” with no specific date announced at this time.