In a nutshell: Mountain View has officially joined the custom-CPU crowd by showing off its first "general-purpose" processor. The Google Axion chip leverages the Arm architecture to provide significant improvements for both cloud customers and Google's own services. According to the company, on internal tests processing Google services' data, Axion is up to 50% faster than modern x86 processors and up to 60% more energy efficient.
During the Cloud Next event held in Las Vegas, Google unveiled its much-rumored custom CPU. Google Axion is the company's first Arm-based processor specifically designed for data center applications, which is set to bring "industry-leading" performance to cloud customers and web services later this year.
Google's Axion is based on the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU core design, which is built on the standard Armv9 instruction set architecture (ISA). Google states that Arm tech is capable of delivering "giant leaps" in performance for general-purpose workloads, including web services, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, AI training, inferencing, and more.
Google has a long history of custom-built chips, though Axion is the first proper CPU the company is adding to its portfolio.
Previous accelerators designed by Google include Tensor Processing Units and Video Coding Units (for up to 33x efficiency in video transcoding). Google decided to seriously invest in custom system-on-chip designs in 2021, while releasing its Tensor chips for mobile devices.
Specific accelerators are essential for today's computing needs, but general-purpose CPUs remain and will continue to be a critical technology in the future as well. Thanks to Armv9 ISA, Google estimates that its new Axion chips will deliver cloud instances with up to 30 percent better performance compared to the "fastest general-purpose" Arm-based instances available today. When compared with x86-based cloud instances, Axion CPUs will provide 50 percent more performance and 60 percent better energy efficiency, according to Google.
Axion chips will be assisted by new custom microcontrollers known as Titanium, which are designed to offload ancillary "platform operations" such as networking, security, and storage I/O processing. Google Cloud services are already 1.5x more energy efficient than the industry average, the company claims, but Axion processors will provide even more efficiency and computing capabilities.
Google hasn't provided additional details about Axion capabilities, including the number of Armv9 cores featured in the new chips. Competing architectures based on Neoverse V2 from Nvidia and Amazon AWS have been using a 72-core and a 96-core design, respectively.
Anticipating a platform-wide adoption of the Axion tech, Google is preparing its transition to Arm by porting many of its services including advertising, Earth Engine, BigTable, BigQuery, and more. Cloud customers will likely be offered Axion-based instances later this year.