Google Officially Launches Axion, Arm-Based CPU for Data Centers

Google Axion CPU. (Google doc)

AYOSURABAYA.COM — Google has announced its first Arm-based CPU for data centers, the Axion.

Google's launch of the Axion CPU is likely in response to Amazon's Arm chips powering the giant's data centers.

The Google Axion chip is designed using Arm's Neoverse V2 CPU. Axion performs 30% better than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available for cloud computing today.

This CPU is also claimed to have 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than “comparable current generation x86-based instances.”

Soon, Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform will use Axion.

“Massive leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, containerized microservices, open source databases, in-memory caching, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training, and inference,” Google's statement read, reportedgsmarena, Thursday, April 11 2024.

The Axion is built on Titanium, which Google calls a custom-made, scale-out tiered silicon microcontroller system.

This system is claimed to be able to handle platform operations such as network and security. Google also said that Axion has greater capacity and better performance.

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 software and solutions compatible with Axion are now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Axion availability is planned for "later this year," Google said. However, no more specific information has been disclosed at this time.(*)