Google Axion Processors – Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center

Goole taking a page from Apple’s playbook.

They must be really trying to pump the Next conference attendance numbers.

Amazing

Sounds like some middle manager will retire this even before launch so they can replace it with Google Axion CPU or some meaningless name change

Xcode cloud isn’t running on Apple silicon, arguably a place where it would make tons of sense.

It’s not at all a given that this would be profitable. Apple is not paying the same prices for AWS/GCP that mere mortals do.

Nonetheless, Intel and AMD must be sweating as another hyperscaler breaks away from using x86 exclusively.

My hunch is that this is theater. The executives wanted this program as a weapon. Google didn't like being at the mercy of processor suppliers. Now they can threaten to just make their own. It could ultimately turn out to be a bluff, if their suppliers drop their price and improve their lineup. Source: made it up.

> you only get M* chips if you buy Apple hardware.

Former M* team members are now at Qualcomm and HP/Dell/Lenovo will ship their Arm laptops later this year, including Windows 11 and upstream Linux support.

Aren’t all of these ARM chips? Why is compatibility such a big issue?

PC hardware (and hardware in general) has never been particularly open. We simply seem to move from one dominant player to the next. I don't think AWS/GCP using custom chip for their cloud offering changes much of the situation (well at least before they start having weird custom instructions).

These are ARM processors using standard ARM instruction sets.

I don’t see any lock in here.

lower emissions

Do you know of any cloud providers that publish actual data for this? Preferably verifiable, but I'll take anything at this point.

Why vendor lock-in? It even uses the same CPU core as Graviton4, so it's clearly quite a fungible offering to me.

Graviton2 is based on Neoverse N1. Graviton3 is based on Neoverse V1.

The Graviton4, announced last year at AWS re:Invent. is based on Neoverse V2.

So you should expect similar performance to EC2 R8g. I say similar because obviously there may be some difference with clock speed and cache size.

It terms of x86. We are expecting AMD Zen 5c with 160 Core / 320 vCPU later this year.

In what ways? In my experience I've found GCP to easiest to use

As much as I don't trust google and their customer service is trash, their infrastructure is mostly good and some of their services are very aggressively priced. I wouldn't 100% buy into GPC but a multi cloud solution that leverages some of the good bits is definitely a top tier approach.

Doesn't TSMC just fab?

They seem to be doing just fine.

Another interesting challenge for intel (and AMD to a lesser extent).

Are there any benchmarks comparing Threadripers and Xeons with this processor ?

Generic names are often used to avoid copyright and trademark strikes. Other easy naming schemes are rivers, minerals, cities,...

There is a lot of room in the periodic table, too, as MS showed starting with https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-azure-cobalt-100-128-...

If I had to guess, it's because its a hardware change... like you're doing better at implementing software on physics :P

They're accelerating networking and block storage. Do you use those?

I thought Google had started their own core microarchitecture group. Must be slow going.

We walk among you

LMAO

Azure / AWS / Ampere silicon are all Neoverse wrappers, amirite?

Synopsys should make its on to stop all this nonsense zt this point.

Nope, and I don't think Google will publish concrete numbers anytime soon, if ever.

Server CPUs are not power hungry. Only the CPUs used in desktops and workstations are power hungry.

The server CPUs (including x86 like AMD Genoa/Bergamo) normally consume between 2 W and 4 W per core, the same as the big cores of the laptop or smartphone CPUs.

A server CPU consumes hundreds of watts only because it has a very large number of cores, so it is equivalent with a very large number of smartphones or laptops collocated in the same box.

In complete servers, there is a significant fraction of the power that is not consumed by the CPUs but by the many high-speed interfaces. That is unavoidable and it does not depend on the architecture of the CPUs.

Any newly announced server CPU should be more efficient than those already in production, otherwise there would be few advantages in introducing it, but which core architecture is used does not have enough influence as to ensure that it will not be leapfrogged by whatever server CPU will be announced later, regardless of the core ISA.

When Apple has switched to Arm it was able to improve the efficiency by using much lower clock frequencies than Intel. This was only an indirect effect of using the Arm ISA, because it makes much easier the concurrent decoding of a great number of instructions. For server CPUs, the Arm ISA cannot enable similar efficiency gains, because all server CPUs are already using the most efficient clock frequencies, in the range 2.5 to 3.5 GHz, so it is not possible to repeat an efficiency gain like in Apple M1, by reducing the clock frequency.

All the cloud vendors have chosen Arm because it is the only ISA that can be currently used to design their own high-performance SoCs, not because it would provide efficiency gains over the Intel/AMD cores. The overall efficiency of a custom SoC will indeed be better, because it is streamlined for their specific system architecture, in comparison with a general-purpose CPU from Intel, AMD or Ampere.

That'd be like complaining AWS don't sell Graviton chips to the public. Why would they, they're a cloud provider building their own chip to get a competitive edge. Selling hardware is a whole other business.

I would be very surprised if there is much overlap between this server sku and any mobile sku. Mainly because Google doesn’t design the compute core, they integrate some number of cores together with many different peripherals into an soc. Mobile hardware will need vastly different integrations than server hardware and the power / area optimizations will be very different. (Mobile is heavily limited by a maximum heat dissipation limit through the case) the reusable bits like arm cores and pcie / network interfaces might be reusable between designs, but many of those come from other venders like arm or synopsis