Run general-purpose workloads on Google Axion Processors for exceptional performance, energy-efficiency and advanced capabilities.

Google præsenterer første Arm-baserede CPU'er

Med sigte på brug i datacenter-applikationer med mere introducerer Google den såkaldte Axion processor, der er baseret på en Arm Neoverse V2 CPU (in english).

Google has presented the new Google Axion processors, the companies first custom Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center. Axion delivers industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year.

Axion is the latest in a long line of custom Google silicon. Since 2015 Google has released five generations of Tensor Processing Units (TPU): in 2018 the company released the first Video Coding Unit (VCU), achieving up to 33x more efficiency for video transcoding; in 2021, Google  doubled-down on custom compute by investing in system on a chip (SoC) designs, and released the first of three generations of Tensor chips for mobile devices.

While Google investments in compute accelerators have transformed customers’ capabilities, general-purpose compute is and will remain a critical portion of Google's customers’ workloads. Analytics, information retrieval, and ML training and serving all require a huge amount of compute power. Customers and users who wish to maximize performance, reduce infrastructure costs, and meet sustainability goals have found that the rate of CPU improvements has slowed recently. Amdahl’s Law suggests that as accelerators continue to improve, general purpose compute will dominate the cost and limit the capability of our infrastructure unless we make commensurate investments to keep up.

Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances.

That’s why Google already have started deploying Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon.

Unrivaled performance and efficiency, underpinned by Titanium

Built using the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU, Axion processors deliver giant leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads like web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training and inferencing, and more.

Axion is underpinned by Titanium, a system of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads. Titanium offloads take care of platform operations like networking and security, so Axion processors have more capacity and improved performance for customer workloads. Titanium also offloads storage I/O processing to Hyperdisk, the new block storage service that decouples performance from instance size and that can be dynamically provisioned in real time.

- Google’s announcement of the new Axion CPU marks a significant milestone in delivering custom silicon that is optimized for Google’s infrastructure, and built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform. Decades of ecosystem investment, combined with Google’s ongoing innovation and open-source software contributions ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to customers running on Arm everywhere, says Rene Haas, CEO, Arm.

Beyond performance, customers want to operate more efficiently and meet their sustainability goals. Google Cloud data centers are already 1.5X more efficient than the industry average and deliver 3X more computing power with the same amount of electrical power compared with five years ago2. Google has set ambitious goals to operate our offices, campuses, and data centers on carbon-free energy, 24/7, and offer tools to help you report on carbon emissions. With Axion processors, customers can optimize for even more energy-efficiency.

Axion - out-of-the-box application compatibility and interoperability

Google also has a rich history of contributions to the Arm ecosystem. Google built and open sourced Android, Kubernetes, Tensorflow and the Go language, and worked closely with Arm and industry partners to optimize them for the Arm architecture.

Axion is built on the standard Armv9 architecture and instruction set. Most recently, Google contributed to SystemReady Virtual Environment (VE), Arm’s hardware and firmware interoperability standard that ensures common operating systems and software packages can seamlessly run on Arm-based servers and VMs, making it easier for customers to deploy Arm workloads on Google Cloud with limited-if-any code rewrites. Through this collaboration, Google is accessing an ecosystem of tens of thousands of cloud customers already deploying workloads and leveraging Arm-native software from hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.

Customers will be able to use Axion in many Google Cloud services including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Batch, and more. Arm-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and Google recently launched preview support for Arm-based instances migration in the Migrate to Virtual Machines service.