Google has made a significant stride in the tech industry by unveiling its inaugural custom ARM processor named "Axion," tailored specifically for data centres.
This move follows the footsteps of other tech giants like Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft, who have ventured into developing their own server processors to reduce reliance on established microprocessor manufacturers such as Intel and Nvidia.
The Axion chip, developed in-house by Google, is based on ARM's Nanovers V2 technology. ARM, a renowned British chip design company, licences its CPU products to various companies, including Apple and Qualcomm.
With almost 99 percent of premium smartphones powered by ARM technology, Google aims to harness the performance benefits offered by ARM architecture in its data centre operations.
According to Google, the Axion chip boasts impressive performance metrics, offering up to 30 percent better performance compared to the fastest general-purpose Arm-based virtual machines available in the cloud today.
Additionally, it promises up to 50 percent better performance and up to 60 percent better energy efficiency compared to comparable VMs based on x86 architecture.
The Axion chip is designed to support a wide range of workloads, including Google's internal tasks and general-purpose compute workloads such as web serving, data analytics, containerized workloads, and databases.
While Google has not disclosed detailed specifications of the chip, it has revealed that Axion chips are already powering several Google services, including the YouTube ads platform, Google Earth Engine, BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, and Pub/Sub.
This strategic move by Google underscores the intensifying competition in the cloud infrastructure market, where organisations increasingly rely on data centres for their computing needs.
Google Cloud, led by executive Thomas Kurian, has emerged as a significant revenue contributor, representing nearly 11 percent of Google's total revenue in Q4 2023.
Despite its relatively smaller market share compared to Amazon and Microsoft, Google aims to strengthen its position in the cloud infrastructure market with the introduction of its custom Axion chip.
The adoption of ARM-based CPUs in the cloud data centre market is on the rise, with various players deploying their custom CPUs at scale. Amazon's AWS introduced its Graviton1 processor in 2018, followed by similar initiatives from Alibaba and Microsoft in subsequent years.
Google's expertise in ARM designs, demonstrated through its Tensor chip powering Pixel smartphones, positions it well to capitalise on the growing demand for custom silicon solutions in the cloud computing landscape.
As Google continues to innovate in the semiconductor space, its transition to a truly custom chip for Pixel devices in 2025 signifies its commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to drive performance and efficiency across its product portfolio.
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