Google on Tuesday revealed the details of a new version of its data center artificial intelligence chips and announced an Arm-based CPU. Google Cloud joined AWS and Azure by making an announcement of its first custom-built Arm CPU, dubbed Axion.
The CPU is based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
Google Arm CPU importance
Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are one of the few viable alternatives to the advanced AI chips made by Nvidia, though developers can only access them through Google’s Cloud Platform and not buy them directly.
“We’re making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm,” said Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure. “Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without re-architecting or re-writing their apps.”
Google Arm chip unveiling
Google plans to offer the Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) called Axion via Google Cloud. The company said it has superior performance to x86 chips, and general-purpose Arm chips in the cloud.
Rival cloud operators such as Amazon.com and Microsoft have built Arm CPUs as a way of differentiating the computing services they offer. Google has built other custom chips for YouTube, AI and its smartphones but had not built a CPU.
TPU chips
Broadcom has partnered with Google on prior generations of the TPU chips. Google declined to comment on whether it used a design partner for Axion and Broadcom’s involvement with the TPU v5p.
The Alphabet subsidiary said the new TPU v5p chip is built to run in pods of 8,960 chips, and can achieve twice the raw performance as the prior generation of TPUs. To help ensure the pod runs at optimal performance, Google uses liquid cooling.
Google new processor performance
The Axion chip offers 30% better performance than “general-purpose Arm chips, and 50% better performance than current generation x86 chips produced by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Google plans to use Axion to power services such as its YouTube Ads in Google Cloud “soon.” The TPU v5p is generally available via Google’s cloud on Tuesday.
Google new processor availability
No update on availability, dates, pricing, additional technical data has been provided. The company has not said anything about which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.
“Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year,” Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said.
Stock update
Arm Holdings (ARM) stock jumped Tuesday after Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google announced its first central processing unit for its data centers based on Arm technology. But Arm stock couldn’t hold on to those gains. Google stock was 158.14 up about +2.00 today
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