Google today announced Axion, its first Arm-based processor designed for cloud and data centers, at the Cloud 2024 conference.
In its blog post on the subject, the company stated that the Axion processor is the last step in the company’s effort to design its own chips. Google claims that the new Axion chips, which use Arm’s Neoverse V2 platform, will deliver up to 30 percent better performance than previous Arm-based CPUs built for data centers and up to 50 percent better performance than existing chips based on x86 design.
“Axion is powered by Titanium, which consists of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and layered scaling offload systems. Titanium offloads take care of platform operations such as networking and security, so Axion processors have more capacity and improved performance for customer workloads. Titanium also offloads storage I/O to Hyperdisk, our new block storage service that decouples performance from instance size and can be dynamically provisioned in real time.”
The company already uses current-generation Arm-based servers in its data centers to power many of its services, including Google Earth Engine and the YouTube Ads platform. He says that in addition to these services, he will soon move others to Axion-based servers.
Axion-based servers will be available for Google Cloud customers in late 2024.
