Tech giant Google unveiled information on Tuesday about a new version of its data center artificial intelligence chips and revealed an Arm-based central processor. The company’s tensor processing units, only accessible to developers through Google’s Cloud Platform, are considered one of the few alternatives to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips.
Google will also use Google Cloud to provide access to Axion, the Arm-based central processing unit, which the company said performs 30% better than general-purpose Arm chips and 50% better than Intel’s and Advance Micro Devices’ x86 chips. Additionally, the new TPU v5p chip, which runs in pods of 8,960 chips, can achieve double the raw performance of prior TPU, Google said.
“We’re making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm,” said Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure. “Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without re-architecting or re-writing their apps.”
Axion, which is currently used by services such as YouTube Ads in Google Cloud, will be offered to the public later this year. The TPU v5P chip, however, is now generally available via Google Cloud.
