Google has announced an important novelty: the launch of the series of Axion processors, the company’s first CPUs based on ARM-derived architecture designed for the world of data centers. The Mountain View company explains that the milestone just achieved represents a real milestone: the Axion offer will support activities such as information search, global video distribution andgenerative artificial intelligence.
Axion’s design is the result of a long review process design used up to now: for this reason the company led by Sundar Pichai will be able to insure performance ed energy efficiency industry leader, available to Google Cloud customers later this year.
What the ARM-based Google Axion CPU looks like
The heart of Axion is Titanium, a silicon microcontroller system specifically designed to look, among other things, at maximum scalability. The configuration based on Titanium It also takes care of network operations and security, enabling Axion processors to deliver greater capacity and improved performance for customer workloads.
The I/O processing regarding the data storage are transferred to HyperdiskGoogle’s new block storage service, which decouples performance from instance size and can be subject to provisioning dynamic in real time.
Axion is built using the CPU as a foundation ARM Neoverse V2 and offers notable performance improvements for general purpose workloads such as web servers, application servers, containerized microservices, open source databases, caches in-memorydata analytics, media processing, training, and inference engines for CPU-based AI applications, and more.
According to Google, Axion offers up to 30% more performance compared to ARM architecture-based instances currently available in the cloud; a performance improvement of up to 50% and up to 60% in terms of energy efficiency compared to current x86-based instances.
Processors that help achieve sustainability goals
Beyond performance, customers want to operate more efficiently and achieve their goals sustainability objectives. Spokesmen for the company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin explain that i data center Google Cloud they are already 1.5 times more efficient than the industry average and offer 3 times more computing power with the same amount of electricity compared to five years ago. Thanks to the new Axion CPU offering, customers can optimize energy efficiency even further.
Axion is built on the architecture and instruction set Armv9 standard. Google recently contributed to the development of the virtual environment (VE) SystemReady of ARM, a standard that establishes a common basis for hardware and firmware interoperability. Users can thus use operating systems and software packages by running them effortlessly on ARM-based servers and virtual machines.
Google Cloud users will be able to select Axion on many services, including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Batch and other. ARM compatible solutions are now available on Google Cloud Marketplace and the preview of support for migrating ARM-based instances was recently launched.
Google partners and customers have already enthusiastically welcomed the announcement of the new Axion processors. The advantages will in fact materialize in significantly improved performance, a more attractive price-performance ratio and greater sustainability.
Even companies like CrowdStrike, Cybereason, Datadog, Elastic, OpenX, Snap e WP Engine have expressed their interest in the new processors, highlighting the potential improvements in performance, energy efficiency and sustainability.