Meet Axion, Google's first custom Arm-based CPU
Google Cloud has announced the launch of its first-ever custom-built Arm processor, named Axion. This innovative processor is a product of Arm's Neoverse 2 designs and will be used for data centers. Google claims that the Axion instances outperform other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft by a significant 30%. "Axion delivers industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year," said Google in a blog post.
Axion promises superior performance and energy efficiency
Google further asserts that Axion delivers up to 50% superior performance and 60% enhanced energy efficiency compared to similar X86-based instances. However, the tech giant has not yet provided any supporting documentation for these claims. "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," said Google spokesperson Amanda Lam. The tech giant said it has already started deploying services like BigTable, Spanner, Google Earth Engine, and YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers.
Axion built on open foundation for seamless transition
The introduction of the Axion processor is another milestone in Google's journey of technological innovation. The company has previously engineered its proprietary TPU AI chips and more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. Despite limited information about the new Axion processor, Google emphasized its construction on an open foundation. This means that Google Cloud customers can transition their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications.
