Google unveils its first data center processor as it joins Microsoft and Amazon in a billion-dollar hardware race — Intel and AMD will be nervous to see strategic partners turn into formidable x86 rivals

Google revealed its first custom Arm-based CPUs for data centers at its Google Cloud Next 24 event.

The new Google Axion processors are intended for general-purpose workloads such as web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, and so on. 

The company’s investment in custom silicon dates back to 2015 when the tech behemoth launched its first Tensor Processing Units (TPU). Google has also developed its own Video Coding Unit (VCU) and Tensor chips for mobile devices. 

A significant milestone

Google's main rivals for cloud services, Amazon and Microsoft, have their own CPUs based on Arm technology, but Amin Vahdat, Google's vice president of machine learning, systems and cloud AI boasted, "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."

Axion CPUs will also have "up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances," Vahdat added. 

Built using the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU and on the standard Armv9 architecture and instruction set, the new processors are underpinned by Titanium, a system of custom silicon microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads designed to optimize performance for customer workloads. 

"Google’s announcement of the new Axion CPU marks a significant milestone in delivering custom silicon that is optimized for Google’s infrastructure, and built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform," Arm CEO Rene Haas said.

"Decades of ecosystem investment, combined with Google’s ongoing innovation and open-source software contributions ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to customers running on Arm everywhere." 

The contributions to the Arm ecosystem that Haas mentioned include open-sourcing Android, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and the Go language, and should pave the way for Axion's application compatibility and interoperability. Google says customers will be able to seamlessly deploy Arm workloads on Google Cloud with limited code rewrites, accessing an ecosystem of cloud customers and software developers leveraging Arm-native software. 

The new Axion processors will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year. Virtual machines based on the CPUs will be available in preview in the coming months.

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