{"id":6949,"date":"2024-04-09T08:14:06","date_gmt":"2024-04-09T15:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=6949"},"modified":"2024-04-09T08:14:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T15:14:51","slug":"google-announces-axion-its-first-custom-arm-based-data-center-processor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2024\/04\/09\/google-announces-axion-its-first-custom-arm-based-data-center-processor\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Announces Axion, Its First Custom Arm-Based Data Center Processor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An interesting development in the data center hosting landscape. Consequently, as Arm is growing in popularity, the really interesting chip technology coming next will be RISC-V<\/a>, which will not have the baggage of licensing fees associated with Arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/04\/09\/google-announces-axion-its-first-custom-arm-based-data-center-processor\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

By Frederic Lardinois<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. Based on Arm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google did not provide any documentation to back these claims up and, like us, you\u2019d probably like to know more about these chips. We asked a lot of questions, but Google politely declined to provide any additional information. No availability dates, no pricing, no additional technical data. Those \u201cbenchmark\u201d results? The company wouldn\u2019t even say which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTechnical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year,\u201d Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the chips aren\u2019t even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips<\/a> and, more recently<\/a>, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips<\/a> late last year, too, and those chips aren\u2019t yet available to customers, either. But Microsoft Azure offered instances based on Ampere\u2019s Arm servers since 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday\u2019s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications. That\u2019s really no surprise. Anything else would\u2019ve been a very dumb move on Google Cloud\u2019s part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe recently contributed to the SystemReady Virtual Environment<\/a>, which is Arm\u2019s hardware and firmware interoperability standard that ensures common operating systems and software packages can run seamlessly in ARM-based systems,\u201d Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud\u2019s VP for compute and AI\/ML infrastructure, explained. \u201cThrough this collaboration, we\u2019re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting development in the data center hosting landscape. Consequently, as Arm is growing in popularity, the really interesting chip technology coming next will be RISC-V, which will not have the baggage of licensing fees associated with Arm. https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/04\/09\/google-announces-axion-its-first-custom-arm-based-data-center-processor\/ By Frederic Lardinois Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6949"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6951,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6949\/revisions\/6951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}