Google Cloud Rolls Out Self-Designed Arm Chips in its Data Centers

谷歌 is joining the custom Arm data center chip trend. Google Cloud , the cloud platform company that faces competition from Cloud9 Community Channel and Amazon Web Services (AWS) , is releasing its Arm-based chip designs in line with other businesses. Google claims that its latest "Google Axion Processors" constitute "custom Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center" that provide "industry-leading performance and energy efficiency."

Although the business has been creating specialized data center accelerators for applications such as artificial intelligence and video transcoding, this is the first time Google has produced a CPU. Google claims to be experiencing "50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances."

Because Google's "Axion" processor is built on the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU, "custom" chip manufacturers are carefully adhering to many of the blueprints that Arm makes accessible, just like with ARM chips found in smartphones. According to Google, it did come with a specially designed microprocessor known as "Titanium," which manages storage I/O, networking, and security.

You won't be purchasing anything with an "Axion" chip in it because this is Google Cloud. Google has identified "Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Batch, and more" as services that will make use of the new CPU, and you can pay for cloud processing that makes use of it. Although Google doesn't explicitly state it in the post, some of these services charge based on "vCPU" consumption, so in theory, a faster CPU may result in cheaper costs. BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform are all being internally moved by Google from its present Arm servers to this new, specially designed one shortly.

Promoting a new cloud infrastructure CPU seems a little odd considering that the main benefit of services like AWS and Google Cloud is that you can stop worrying about the server. While businesses like Google, 亚马逊 , and Microsoft handle all that complex hardware and network data center stuff, the services you are running will stay operational. Google states that cloud clients can register for access to Axion virtual machines (VMs) when they become available as a "preview" in "the coming months."