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Google Axion Processors – Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center
- dmitrygr 3y agoSummary: no timelines, no specifics, NOT a custom core (just neoverse), benchmarks with no references.
- jsheard 3y agoNonetheless, Intel and AMD must be sweating as another hyperscaler breaks away from using x86 exclusively.
- mtmail 3y agoThey probably already knew it was coming. Announcing it 2 weeks before Alphabet/Google quarterly results might be timed.
- jsnell 3y agoIt's obviously timed to the Google Cloud Next conference, which starts today.
- refulgentis 3y agoThe Cloud Next Conference is obviously timed to the quarterly results which is obviously timed to the ARM processors, wait, no, the ARM processors are obviously time to the Cloud Next Conference which is obviously timed to the quarterly results
- warkdarrior 3y agoAnd it's all timed to come out before Halloween. What kind of sorcery is this?
- osnium123 3y agoThis is probably one reason why Intel is moving towards providing foundry services. The barrier to entry for doing chip manufacturing is higher than for designing chips now. It’s still an open question if Intel can compete with TSMC and Samsung though.
- ajross 3y agoIntel 4 is superior to anything Samsung offers, and not nearly as far behind TSMC's 3nm density as people are lead to believe. The "open question" is mostly about fab scaling and the business side of foundary management. Their silicon works just fine in the market as it stands.
- chx 3y agoI read a lot about how important it is for a foundry to be able to work with customers and this used to miss from the company DNA of Intel. Cell library, process that sort of thing. We shall see.
- bfrog 3y agoIntel 20a and 18a are the really exciting processes yet to come out from everything reported. It seems like a game of catch up until then.
- cmpxchg8b 3y agoI doubt it, Google has been using Ampere for some time.
- bigcat12345678 3y agoRight, Google invested in non x86 since 2016 afaik (I was in the team supporting arm powerpc inside Google). At the size of Google, it's pretty much can break from any vendors without damaging it's core businesses
- hulitu 3y agoMaybe when there are some real life comparison.
- geor9e 3y agoMy 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.
- DrBazza 3y agoBuzzword soup and lots of X% better than Y or Z times something. Any ELI5 version of this with concrete numbers and comparisons?
- sapiogram 3y agoNope, and I don't think Google will publish concrete numbers anytime soon, if ever.
- wmf 3y agoPhoronix will benchmark it at some point.
- HankB99 3y agoI wonder if TOS precludes publishing benchmark results like some SQL database products. I also wonder if home users will ever be able to buy one of these? Will the predecessor show up in the used market?
- wmf 3y agoThe major cloud providers are pretty good about allowing benchmarking. The closest thing you can buy is Ampere or Grace. Graviton 1 chips are also floating around under a different name.
- djoldman 3y agoalso at techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/google-announces-axion-its-first-custom-arm-based-data-center-processor/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/google-announces-axion-its... > Google did not provide any documentation to back these claims up and, like us, you’d probably like to know more about these chips. We asked a lot of questions, but Google politely declined to provide any additional information. No availability dates, no pricing, no additional technical data. Those “benchmark” results? The company wouldn’t even say which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.
- xyst 3y agoThey must be really trying to pump the Next conference attendance numbers.
- thebytefairy 3y agoProbably not, given it starts today and is already sold out.
- Takennickname 3y agoOther way around probably. Team had the next conference as a deadline and this is all they were able to come up with.
- miohtama 3y agoGoole taking a page from Apple’s playbook.
- mtmail 3y agoEight testimonials and it's clear the companies haven't been able to test anything yet. "[company] has been a trusted partner for customers adopting Arm-based virtual machines and an early adopter of Arm for our own operations. We’re excited about Google Cloud's announcement of the Axion processor and plan to evaluate it [...]'
- shrubble 3y agoDownside is that GCP still has the same faults regardless of which CPU is being used. Things like poor customer interaction, things not working as designed etc. Switching to ARM won't solve that.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoAs 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.
- hnav 3y agohow do you deal with egress costs?
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI don't think they're a big deal if you're hitting vertex for inference and cloud run for long tail services. If you're 50/50 with AWS though that might be a different story.
- thebytefairy 3y agoIn what ways? In my experience I've found GCP to easiest to use
- redman25 3y agoFeels like they've changed their pricing structure for bigquery multiple times in the past couple years. They've never turned the status page yellow or red but there have been a few incidences where from our perspective the service was clearly degraded.
- gigatexal 3y agoyeah on the whole (data eng by day -- data eng contractor by night) using both AWS and GCP I much prefer GCP to AWS. I find it far more simple to use, has sane defaults, a UI that isn't harmful to users doing clickops, etc. AWS gives you low level primitives to build the moon or shoot yourself in the foot.
- formerly_proven 3y agoHow do you do, fellow "gluing neoverse cores to synopsys IP" hyperscalers?
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- cmpxchg8b 3y agoWe walk among you
- bgnn 3y agoSynopsys should make its on to stop all this nonsense zt this point.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoLMAO Azure / AWS / Ampere silicon are all Neoverse wrappers, amirite?
- starspangled 3y agoI thought Google had started their own core microarchitecture group. Must be slow going.
- cudder 3y ago[flagged]
- geodel 3y agoYou will start using after they discontinue?
- FlyingSnake 3y agoI came here expecting this comment. It’s interesting that a tech vanguard community like HN doesn’t trust Google products.
- wiz21c 3y agodoesn't trust anymore
- Zach_the_Lizard 3y agoWe used to, until they canceled that trust
- tyho 3y agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Their reputation is deserved. Google domains was killed only last year!
- jsheard 3y agoGoogle does kill a lot of products but that site rubs me the wrong way, they really stretch the definition of "killed" to run up the numbers as much as possible. Products that were simply rebranded or merged into another product are listed as "killed" even though they functionally still exist. The old Google Drive desktop client is on there, for example, when they still have a Drive desktop client. You may as well list Chrome versions 1 through 122 as products they've killed by that standard.
- freedomben 3y ago
- martinpw 3y agoLooks like GCP has been using ARM processors from Ampere since mid 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tau-t2a-is-first-compute-engine-vm-on-an-arm-chip https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tau-t2a-is-fi... So I guess this may be the end for Ampere on GCP?
- qhwudbebd 3y agoLooks like it's cloud-scam only, rather than a product one can actually buy and own?
- sofixa 3y agoThat'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.
- synack 3y agoAll I wanna know is how it compares to AWS Graviton2/3/4 instances. Axion needs to be cheaper, faster, or lower emissions to be worth even considering. Everything else is just talk and vendor lock in.
- ksec 3y agoGraviton2 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.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- sapiogram 3y ago> 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.
- jeffbee 3y agoGoogle. See https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2023-environmental-report.pdf#page=90 https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2023-e... and below.
- synack 3y agoGoogle published PUE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness) numbers a while ago, I haven’t seen anything that specific from Amazon. It’s difficult to quantify emissions because the power generation is mixed and changes based on demand. Water consumption should also be a factor, but there’s even less data available for that.
- my123 3y ago
- xyst 3y agoI’m all for investment in less power hungry chips. Even if it’s from Google (for a short period of time. Who knows how long these chips will be supported)
- adrian_b 3y agoServer 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.
- jbverschoor 3y agoI'm curious to see when Apple will migrate off AWS and run their own datacenters on their own ARM socs
- mrbluecoat 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ericlewis 3y agoXcode cloud isn’t running on Apple silicon, arguably a place where it would make tons of sense.
- jbverschoor 3y agoThat does not make any sense
- saagarjha 3y agoidk running a Hackintosh is kind of strange no
- pjmlp 3y agoSo how do you think they are running those unit tests for iDevices APIs, VMs?
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoI wonder if this is part of their new SoC chips they've been building to replace tensor on the pixel line.
- MobiusHorizons 3y agoI 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
- sega_sai 3y agoWhat's up with physics names ? Axion, Graviton, Ampere, Electron. I guess it sounds cool and is not trademarked... What's next ? -- boson, hadron, parsec ?
- winwang 3y agoIf I had to guess, it's because its a hardware change... like you're doing better at implementing software on physics :P
- the_panopticon 3y agoThere is a lot of room in the periodic table, too, as MS showed starting with https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-azure-cobalt-100-128-core-arm-neoverse-n2-cpu-launched/ https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-azure-cobalt-100-128-...
- devnullbrain 3y agoFewer thank you'd think. It turns out the poisonous ones are bad for PR.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Koffiepoeder 3y agoGeneric names are often used to avoid copyright and trademark strikes. Other easy naming schemes are rivers, minerals, cities,...
- ThinkBeat 3y agoWith more and more big players starting production of customized private proprietary hardware compatibility becomes increasingly difficult. Which works out well for the big players who can leverage it as lock ins. Regular people wont be able to buy the chips from Microsoft, Google, and you only get M* chips if you buy Apple hardware. Good luck with the frankenMacs now. At the same time devices that you buy get locked into company as well, and if that company goes out of business you are screwed. Like I was when Ambi Climate closed up shop and left with e-waste. All the hardware I need is in there but I can do anything with it. Or when Google decided to close down access for Lenovo Displays, because they didnt want to support 3rd party Displays anymore. Two more e-waste devices for me. (There might be a way to save the Displays I just haven't got in working yet) Open, compatible, standardized omni purpose hardware seems to be dying. Much more profit in lock ins
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- soulbadguy 3y agoPC 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).
- walterbell 3y ago> 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.
- a_wild_dandan 3y agoIf they can match the battery life, then I might switch back to a Linux laptop. I’m so sick of Apple’s anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices.
- soulbadguy 3y agoAnother interesting challenge for intel (and AMD to a lesser extent). Between the share of compute moving to AI accelerator (and NVIDIA), and most cloud provider having in house custom chip, I wonder how intel will positioned themselves in the next 5 to 10 years. Even if they could fab all of those chips, the margin between the fab business and CPU design is pretty drastic.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoDoesn't TSMC just fab? They seem to be doing just fine.
- ethbr1 3y agoTSMC fabs leading node, and has consistently for several cycles now. So its margins probably benefit from a premium. If Intel can make their foundry business work and keep parity with TSMC, the net effect is that margins for leading node compress from the increased competition. And there's a lot of various US fab capacity coming online in 2024/5: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-us-fabs-everything-we-know https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-us-fabs-everything-we-...
- parasense 3y ago> the net effect is that margins for leading node compress from the increased competition. That is true in perfectly competetive markets, but I'm skeptical about that idea holding true for high-end chip nodes. I'm not sure there is enough competition with Intel joining the market alongside TSMC, Samsung, and all the other (currently) minor players in the high-end space. You might see a cartel form instead of a competative market place, which is a setup where the higher margin is protected. My best guess is the price will remain high, but the compression will happen around process yields. You could successfully argue that is the same as compressing margins, but then what happens after peak yield? Before prices compress, all the other compressable things must first squeeze.
- 3y ago
- jeffbee 3y agoI am interested in the market impact of offloads and accelerators. In my work, I can only realistically exploit capabilities that are common between AWS and GCP, since my services must run in both clouds. So I am not going to do any work to adapt my systems to GCP-specific performance features. Am I alone in that?
- wmf 3y agoThey're accelerating networking and block storage. Do you use those?
- jeffbee 3y agoOf course, but even if Google makes somehow networking 50% more efficient, I can't architect my projects around that because I have to run the same systems in AWS (and Azure, for that matter).
- wmf 3y agoIt appears to me that Google is just matching what AWS Nitro did years ago.
- jeffbee 3y agoThat's the flavor of it, but they didn't give us enough data to really think about. But the question stands generally for accelerators and offloads. For example would I go to a lot of trouble to exploit Intel DSA? Absolutely not, because my software mostly runs on AMD and ARM.
- tuananh 3y agowhat happened with ampere? they are falling behind? if this chip has no custom core, just neoverse v2. I dont see any compelling reason for gcp to do this.
- exabrial 3y agoI'm divesting as must as possible from cloud offerings these days. We have our data "lakes" in colocation now, @ 1/40th the cost of the cheapest cloud offerings, but with greatly expanded CPU, mem, and disk, so it's not even an apples-to-apples comparison. What I am jealous of though is these x86 competition announcements by AWS/Gcloud, as there simply is nothing available outside Ampere Alta, and it has not seen a refresh in awhile. The Nvidia Grave CPU is eternally delayed and I'm guessing will not be at a competitive price point if it ever makes it to market. I've come to appreciate how important memory bandwidth is after using a M1 cpu for awhile.
- mcqueenjordan 3y agoI find the posturing as a thought leader and industry leader (on this topic especially) a bit ironic. A cloud provider licensing ARM Neoverse and throwing an ARM chip into their cloud compute boxes is not exactly a novel business practice. I'm happy to see this, and it should be all goodness, but... the posturing... I don't want to be negative for the sake of being negative, but I don't understand how anyone can write that first paragraph with a straight face and publish it when you're announcing ARM chips for cloud in 2024(?, maybe 2025?).