The Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: Explained

The development of custom processors has become a key strategy for cloud service providers to differentiate their offerings and meet the growing demands of data-intensive applications.

This trend has led to increased competition in the chip market, traditionally dominated by Intel and AMD, as cloud giants leverage chips from other companies to create more efficient and cost-effective solutions for their customers.

Now Google Cloud, a division of Alphabet Inc, has announced that the streaming giants Spotify and Paramount Global are now utilising its newly developed Axion chip.

This central processing unit (CPU), designed by Google using technology from Arm Holdings is aimed at powering streaming services more efficiently.

Axion chip's competitive edge

The Axion chip is Google's latest offering in the cloud computing market, designed to compete with traditional CPUs from Intel and AMD.

According to Google, the new chip offers significant improvements in energy efficiency, a crucial factor for cloud service providers and their customers.

Mark Lohmeyer, Vice President and General Manager of compute and AI infrastructure at Google Cloud, stated that the Axion chip is approximately 60% more energy efficient than conventional CPUs.

"This is not the first Arm instance that we've made available in the cloud, but I will say this is the first Google-designed Arm processor, and the first that we have fully brought into the overall Google infrastructure portfolio," Mark said in an interview with Reuters.

Google says that the efficiency gain of the Axion chip allows for power savings that can be redirected to other tasks, such as powering AI applications.

This significant boost in performance could lead to improved user experiences and reduced operational costs for streaming services.

Google is also making the Axion chip available to all of its cloud users, potentially broadening its appeal beyond streaming services.

The chip can be utilised in various Google Cloud services, including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Batch and Dataproc.

Industry-wide adoption of Arm-based chips

Google's move to develop its own Arm-based chip follows similar initiatives by other major cloud computing firms.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have already created their own Arm-based CPUs, which they offer to developers through their cloud services.

Additionally, Ampere Computing – a startup founded by former Intel employees – is supplying chips to Oracle's cloud unit.

The primary advantage of Arm-based chips lies in their significantly lower power consumption compared to their Intel and AMD counterparts, while maintaining comparable computing performance.

This characteristic makes them particularly attractive for cloud service providers looking to optimise their data centre operations and reduce energy costs.

Mark emphasised the significance of this development: "We expect this to be the primary offering that our customers will use going forward."

Jignesh Dhruv, VP Video Engineering, Paramount Streaming also noted that Google Cloud’s Axion ensures that Paramount can encode and distribute content at scale for viewers in a timely manner, focusing on video quality, vibrant visuals and immersive audio regardless of the consumer's device or connection.

He says: "Google Cloud's Axion and C4A VMs provide the performance and efficiency we need to leverage the latest advancements in video encoding technology.

C4A VMs are Google Cloud's compute-optimised virtual machines powered by Titanium IPU for improved performance.

He continues: “With C4A VMs, we're able to utilise higher efficiency of the new Arm processors to achieve 33% faster encode times, compared to older VMs.”

Amongst the introduction of the Axion chip, Google Cloud is experiencing strong growth.

In the third quarter of 2024, the company reported revenue of US$11.4bn, representing a 35% increase from the previous year.

Dave Zolotusky, Principal Engineer at Spotify summed up the potential impact: “Our tests on Axion have shown roughly 250% better performance than we’ve seen on our workloads on Google Cloud to date."

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