Google launches Axion, its first Arm-based CPU to challenge Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft
The Axion chips are already powering Google services such as the Google Earth Engine and YouTube ads.
Google is finally getting into making chips (no, I don't mean potato chips) as it looks to take on computer chip-making giants in their own turf.
Dubbed Axion, the tech giant's chip is Arm-based and custom-built, which it plans to use in its AI development in data centers before rolling it out to its cloud business customers “later this year.”
According to the company, "Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances."
The Axion chips are already powering Google services such as the Google Earth Engine and YouTube ads, and there are plans to enable its customers to use the Axion CPU in cloud services including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, and Cloud Batch.
With the Axion Arm-based CPU touted to out-perform “general-purpose Arm chips” by 30 percent and boasting 50 percent more performance than Intel’s existing processors, it would be interesting to see how Microsoft – which revealed its own custom silicon chips designed for its cloud infrastructure months ago – and Nvidia – the leading giant in chip-making – responds to this threat.
