Google Cloud has introduced its first ARM CPU during Google Cloud Next. The Axion is based on the Neoverse 2 design. It reportedly delivers 30 percent better performance than ARM chips from competitors Azure and AWS. In addition, the chip is 50 percent more powerful and 60 percent more efficient than comparable x86 instances (read: Intel Xeons).
These are impressive performance figures Google is boasting about. The Google team has not revealed how it arrived at those numbers, however. Regardless, once this Axion chip is available and customers can start using it, we will be able to tell if the promised performance matches reality.
Still much unclear
A lot is still unclear about the new offering. For example, we do not yet know when this new chip will be available in Google Cloud and what the cost of an instance will be. We assume the chip will become available later this year. Google promises to provide more information and benchmark results in due course so we can draw our own conclusions.
AWS is currently the only hyperscaler that has its own ARM chips available to customers. Microsoft Azure offers the Ampera Altra, but that is not a proprietary ARM chip. Microsoft’s own chips using this architecture are still yet to surface. In any case, it is clear that we are going to see an ARM race in the data center between all three hyperscalers. With this, the computing power of data centers could start to make substantial leaps in the coming years.
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