Google Cloud unveils Axion, its first Arm-based processor

2024-04-09 · Publisher : Google Cloud · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

At Google Cloud Next 2024, Google introduces Axion, an in-house processor built on Arm Neoverse V2. Google claims up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable x86 instances.

### Background On 9 April 2024, at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, Google Cloud announces Axion, its first in-house Arm-based processor. It is built on the Arm Neoverse V2 core and the standard Armv9 instruction set. Google says it already runs its own services on it, and plans to open virtual machines to customers in preview in the following months, then more broadly before the end of 2024. ### Key facts - Up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm instances available in the cloud, according to Google. - Up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86 instances (vendor figures). - Axion relies on Titanium, a set of purpose-built microcontrollers and hardware offloads, and on Hyperdisk block storage. - Google services already run on it: Bigtable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine and the YouTube Ads platform. - The first virtual machines are the C4A instances; vendors such as Datadog, Elastic, Snap and CrowdStrike are among the quoted partners. ### Why it matters After AWS (Graviton) and Microsoft (Cobalt), Google joins the hyperscalers that design their own general-purpose processors. For operations teams, moving container images to Arm becomes increasingly common, with a cost saving in return. Binary and dependency compatibility must be checked before switching. ### Takeaway All three major clouds now offer an in-house Arm processor: x86 is no longer the default choice.

Tags : Google Cloud, Puces, Hyperscaler, Conférence