At the Google Next ’24 conference, Google introduced the new Axion processor, created on the basis of ARM architecture for use in data centers. These processors operating on the basis of the architecture of ARM Neoverse V2 will appear on the market this year.
According to Google, Axion exceeds in performance the most powerful universal processors based on ARM in cloud services by 30%. In addition, the novelty provides 50% greater performance and 60% higher energy efficiency than similar processors based on X86. Amin Wahdat, engineer and vice president of Google, says: “The basis of Axion is a titanium system consisting of specialized microcontrollers and devices for expanding functionality. These control platform operations such as network safe which allows processors to work more efficiently with client tasks. It also controls processing input output data in our new hyperdisk block storage service, separating productivity from size instance to ensure dynamic provision in real time.”
Google declares significant improvements in performance for universal tasks, but specific results or benchmarks have not yet been presented. Axion is now competing with the AWS Graviton processor, which has already reached the fourth generation, and recently announced Microsoft Cobalt.
Now the three largest cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are developing their own chips. Oracle Cloud also actively uses AmPere technologies. If anyone doubted the importance of ARM in the CPU market for data centers, those doubts can now be put to rest.
Axion is built on standard architecture and set of ARMV9 instructions. Google promises that customers will be able to use Axion in various managed services, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, DataProc, DataFlow, and Cloud Batch.
Axion virtual machines will be available in the preliminary version in the coming months. Despite the fact that the new processors are not yet available to customers, Google argues that a number of internal services, including Bigtable, Spanner, Bigquery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and YouTube ADS platform, have already switched to servers on the ARM architecture. Information about prices is not yet provided.