Google announced the release of the latest version of its data center artificial intelligence chips and the introduction of a new Arm-based central processor. The technology giant’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are among the few alternatives to the advanced AI chips produced by Nvidia, although developers can only access them through Google’s Cloud Platform and not buy them directly. With the introduction of the new Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) called Axion, Google plans to offer customers the ability to bring their existing workloads to Arm without having to re-architect or re-write their apps.
Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s Vice President and General Manager of Compute and Machine Learning Infrastructure, said that Axion is built on open foundations, and customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion. The new CPU offers superior performance to both x86 chips and general-purpose Arm chips in the cloud, making it an attractive proposition for businesses looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Amazon.com and Microsoft have already built Arm CPUs as a way of differentiating their computing services, and Google has built other custom chips for YouTube, AI, and its smartphones. However, the company had not previously built a CPU. Broadcom has partnered with Google on prior generations of the TPU chips. While Google declined to comment on whether it used a design partner for Axion, it’s worth noting that Broadcom has been involved with the TPU v5p.
Google’s new TPU v5p chip is built to run in pods of 8,960 chips and can achieve twice the raw performance as the previous generation of TPUs. Liquid cooling is used to help ensure the pod runs at optimal performance. The Axion chip offers 30% better performance than general-purpose Arm chips and 50% better performance than current generation x86 chips produced by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Google has already deployed Axion in several of its services, such as YouTube Ads in Google Cloud. The company plans to expand the use of Axion and make it available to the public later this year. The TPU v5p is generally available via Google’s cloud from Tuesday.
