On Tuesday, Google made a major announcement in the world of AI Chip for data centers. The tech giant revealed details about its new version of AI chips and introduced its first custom-built Arm-based CPU, called Axion.
The Axion CPU
The Axion CPU is based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs and offers impressive performance compared to other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft. In fact, Google claims that its Axion instances offer 30% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
This announcement is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it marks Google’s entry into the world of custom-built CPUs. While the company has previously developed chips for AI, YouTube, and its smartphones, this is the first time it has built a CPU.
Secondly, Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are now one of the few alternatives to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips. However, until now, developers could only access TPUs through Google’s Cloud Platform. With the introduction of Axion, customers can now easily bring their existing workloads to Arm without having to re-architect or rewrite their apps.
Google Way
We’re making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm, said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure at Google Cloud. Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without re-architecting or re-writing their apps.
Google plans to use Axion to power services such as YouTube Ads in Google Cloud soon. The company also announced the release of its new TPU v5p chip, which is built to run in pods of 8,960 chips and offers twice the raw performance as the previous generation of TPUs. To ensure optimal performance, Google uses liquid cooling for these pods.
Unfortunately, no further details about availability, pricing, or technical specifications have been provided by Google. The company has not disclosed which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to. However, they did mention that technical documentation and benchmarking data will be available later this year.
Market Reaction
The announcement of Google’s Axion CPU has already had an impact on the stock market. Arm Holdings (ARM) saw a jump in its stock price after the news broke but could not hold on to those gains. On the other hand, Google’s stock saw a slight increase of about +2.00 today.
In conclusion, Google’s announcement of its first custom-built Arm-based CPU and updated TPU chips is a significant development in the world of data centers and artificial intelligence. With superior performance and energy efficiency compared to other options in the market, Axion has the potential to revolutionize how businesses approach AI workloads. We look forward to seeing how this new technology will shape the future of computing.
