The Good Tech Companies - Axion Processors: Google's First Arm-based CPUs

Starting point is 00:00:00 This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Axion Processors. Google's first ARM-based CPUs, by Google Cloud. At Google, we constantly push the boundaries of computing, exploring what ice possible for grand challenges ranging from information retrieval, global video distribution, and, of course, generative AI. Doing so requires rethinking systems design in deep collaboration with service developers. This rethinking has resulted in our significant investment in custom silicon. Today, we are rethrilled to announce the latest incarnation of this work, Google Axion processors, our first custom ARM-based CPUs designed for the data center. Axion delivers

Starting point is 00:00:43 industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year. Tip new Google Cloud customers from Hacker Noon receive $300 plus an additional $50 in free credits to test, deploy, and explore Google Cloud for 90 days. Get started using the link here. Run general-purpose workloads on Google Axion processors for exceptional performance, energy efficiency and advanced capabilities. Axion is but the latest in a long line of custom Google Silicon. Since 2015 we've released 5 generations of Tensor Processing Units, TPU. In 2018,

Starting point is 00:01:20 we released our first video coding unit, VCU, achieving up to 33x more efficiency for video transcoding. In 2021, we doubled down on custom compute by investing in system-on-a-chip society designs and released the first of three generations of Tensor chips for mobile devices. While our investments in compute accelerators have transformed our customers' capabilities, general-purpose compute is and will remain a critical portion of our customers' workloads. Analytics, information retrieval, and ML training and serving all require a huge amount of compute power. Customers and users who wish to maximize performance, reduce infrastructure costs, and meet sustainability goals have found that the rate of CPU improvements has slowed recently.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Amdahl-Swaff suggests that as accelerators continue to improve, general-purpose compute will dominate the cost and limit the capability of our infrastructure unless we make commensurate investments to keep up. Axion processors combine Google's silicon expertise with Armishigist-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, one. That's why we've already started deploying Google services like Bigtable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub, Sub, Google Earth Engine,

Starting point is 00:02:47 and the YouTube Ads platform in current-generation ARM-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon. Unrivaled performance and efficiency, underpinned by titanium, built using the ARM Neoverse V2 CPU, Axion processors deliver giant leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads like web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training and inferencing, and more. Axion is underpinned by Titanium, a system of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and tiered scale-out

Starting point is 00:03:25 offloads. Titanium offloads take care of platform operations like networking and security, so Axion processors have more capacity and improved performance for customer workloads. Titanium also offloads storage I.O. processing to HyperDisk, our new block storage service that decouples performance from instance size and that can be dynamically provisioned in real time. Greater than, Google's announcement of the new Axion CPU marks a significant milestone in greater than delivering custom silicon that is optimized for Google's infrastructure, and greater than built on our high-performance ARM Neoverse V2 platform. Decades of ecosystem greater than investment, combined with Google's ongoing innovation and open-source software greater than investment, combined with Google's ongoing innovation and

Starting point is 00:04:05 open-source software greater than contributions ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to greater-than-customers running on ARM everywhere. Rene Haas, CEO, ARM Beyond Performance, customers want to operate more efficiently and meet their sustainability goals. Google Cloud data centers are already 1.5x more efficient than the industry average and deliver 3x more computing power with the same amount of electrical power compared with five years ago, too. We've set ambitious goals to operate our offices, campuses, and data centers on carbon-free energy, 24-7, and offer tools to help you report on carbon emissions. With action

Starting point is 00:04:43 processors, customers can optimize for even more energy efficiency. Axion, out-of-the-box application compatibility and interoperability. Google also has a rich history of contributions to the ARM ecosystem. We built an open-sourced Android, Kubernetes, TensorFlow and the Go language, and worked closely with ARM and industry partners to optimize them for the ARM architecture. Axion is built on the standard ARM 9 architecture and instruction set. Most recently, we contributed to System-Ready Virtual Environment, VAE, ARM's hardware and firmware interoperability standard that ensures common operating systems and software packages can seamlessly run on ARM-based servers and VMs, making it easier for customers to deploy

Starting point is 00:05:25 ARM workloads on Google Cloud with limited if any code rewrites. Through this collaboration, we're accessing an ecosystem of 10soft thousands of cloud customers already deploying workloads and leveraging ARM-native software from hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects. Customers will be able to use Axion in many Google Cloud services including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, CloudBatch, and more. ARM-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and we've recently launched preview support for ARM-based instances migration in the Migrate to Virtual Machine service. What our customers and partners are saying?

Starting point is 00:06:05 Greater than, we're thrilled to add application packages built on the new Axion ARM-based greater-than CPU for Google Cloud to the Bitnami by VMware Tanzu library. This will deliver greater than significantly improved performance, attractive price performance, and better greater than sustainability for our users. We're excited to get our hands on the new Google Axion instances and do even more to help our customers streamline deployments greater than and reduce their environmental footprint. Mike Wookie, Senior Director R&D, Greater Than Tanzu Division, Broadcom, Greater Than, organizations all over the world rely on CrowdStrike in our single platform, Greater Than Single Agent Architecture to stop cloud breaches on CrowdStrike in our single platform, greater than single-agent architecture to stop cloud breaches. CrowdStrike delivers the greater-than-industries best protection while

Starting point is 00:06:50 being the fastest to deploy, so we're excited greater than about testing Google's new processor to discover power and efficiency gains. Greater than Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer, CrowdStrike, greater than, our customers demanding compromising cyber security protection that our systems greater than provide we're intrigued by the power and efficiency gains possible with the greater than new Google Cloud's custom arm-based CPU and plan to validate its capabilities greater than as a way to provide even better threat detection and response capabilities to greater than our customers Zatch Siegel VP business development CyberEason greater than our customers. Zach Siegel, VP Business Development, CyberEason, greater than, Datadog has been a trusted partner for customers adopting ARM-based virtual greater than machines

Starting point is 00:07:31 and an early adopter of ARM for our own operations. We're excited greater than about Google Cloud's announcement of the Axion processor and plan to evaluate greater than it on our workloads as we help customers measure the cost and performance greater than benefits of using Datadog on Google Cloud ARM instances. Uriix Garnier, VP greater than of product management. Datadog, greater than. Elastic is committed to helping customers unlock the potential of all their greater than structured and unstructured data efficiently at any scale. We look forward to greater than testing Google Cloud's new custom ARM-based CPU and expect it to help us greater than provide an even better Elastic customer experience on the Google Cloud platform. Steve Kearns, VP of Product, Elastic, greater than, we've built a strong partnership

Starting point is 00:08:16 with Google Cloud over many years and have greater than seen the benefits of building on GCP ARM-based VMs. We can't wait to see the greater-than-remarkable improvements coming with the new generation ARM-based Axion greater-than-processor. Joel Meyer, SVP, Engineering, OpenX, greater-than, Snap empowers everyone to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about greater-than-the-world, and have fun together. We're constantly optimizing our greater-than infrastructure for performance and efficiency. Google's new Axion ARM-based greater-than CPU promises major leaps forward in both. The potential to serve our community greater-than with these gains while leading on our sustainability goals is incredibly greater-than exciting. We look forward to seeing the benefits

Starting point is 00:09:00 of Axion-based virtual greater-than machines when they become available. Corwin Smith Senior Director of Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Snap, Greater-Than, WP Engine powers websites for more than 1.5 million customers across 150 greater-than countries. They rely on WP Engine to deliver on our core promises of greater-than performance, reliability, and security and we take that responsibility to greater-than heart. Our commitment to innovation and a customer-inspired mindset means greater-than we're always looking for ways to further enhance our customers' performance greater-than in confidence online. We're excited to test Google's new custom ARM-based greater-than processor and its anticipated performance and sustainability gains, and greater-than explore how they can empower our customers to create even more compelling greater-than-websites and applications.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Ramadas Prabhakar, SVP and CTO, WP Engine Learn More. Virtual machines based on Axion processors will be available in preview in the coming months. Register your interest today, and if you're here at Next24, come learn more about Axion and other compute announcements in these related sessions. SPTL 205 Workload Optimized and AI-Powered Infrastructure ARC 225 Transform Your Cloud Operations and Design Capability with Gemini For Google Cloud ARC 229 Best Practices to Manage and Automate on Compute Engine

Starting point is 00:10:23 Tip New Google Cloud customers from Hacker Noon receive $300 plus an additional $50 in free credits to test, deploy, and explore Google Cloud for 90 days. Get started using the link here. 1. Google Cloud Internal Data, 31 March 2024. 2. Google Environmental Report, 2023, page 10. Originally published here. Contributed by Google Cloud. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.

The Good Tech Companies - Axion Processors: Google's First Arm-based CPUs

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