[HN Gopher] Google Axion Processors - Arm-based CPUs designed fo...
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Google Axion Processors - Arm-based CPUs designed for the data
center
Author : ksec
Score : 187 points
Date : 2024-04-09 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| DrBazza wrote:
| Buzzword soup and lots of X% better than Y or Z times something.
| Any ELI5 version of this with concrete numbers and comparisons?
| sapiogram wrote:
| Nope, and I don't think Google will publish concrete numbers
| anytime soon, if ever.
| wmf wrote:
| Phoronix will benchmark it at some point.
| HankB99 wrote:
| I 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?
| djoldman wrote:
| also at techcrunch:
|
| 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 wrote:
| They must be really trying to pump the Next conference
| attendance numbers.
| thebytefairy wrote:
| Probably not, given it starts today and is already sold out.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Other way around probably. Team had the next conference as a
| deadline and this is all they were able to come up with.
| devsda wrote:
| Recently there was an article on the frontpage titled
| "headline driven development".
|
| I guess it happens more often than not.
| mtmail wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891948 - That was
| posted Apr/1st so authors were half joking
| miohtama wrote:
| Goole taking a page from Apple's playbook.
| delfinom wrote:
| I remember when Apple marketed swift as being xx times
| faster!
|
| In fine print, compared to python, lul.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This didn't happen
| tyrd12 wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/in/swift/
|
| Upto 8.4x faster Than python
| refulgentis wrote:
| Claim: "In fine print, compared to python,"
|
| Reality: In bold call out:
|
| Up to 2.6X faster than Objective-C
| hu3 wrote:
| Not sure what your point is but Apple also claims up to
| 8.4x faster than Python:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/CZ6vTZV.png
| refulgentis wrote:
| My point is we shifted from "compared it to Python in
| fine print" to "compared it to Objective-C and Python in
| bold focused callout". People are jaded, we can argue
| that's actually the same thing, that's fine, but it is a
| very different situation.
| miohtama wrote:
| As a Python developer, I am happy that Apple mentions
| Python and acknowledge its existence.
| danielbln wrote:
| At least Apple really delivered with the Ax and Mx chips.
| Let's see if that pans out here as well.
| FdbkHb wrote:
| It's google, so probably not. Their claims should always be
| taken with a grain of salt. They went with their own stuff
| route for the SOC on their Google Pixel phone lines and
| those SOC are always much worse than the competition and
| are the main reason why those phones have such terrible
| battery life compared to Qualcomm powered phones.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| At least with Apple's Bezos charts usually there's fineprint
| that'll tell you which 3 year old pc laptop they're comparing
| it to.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Amazing
|
| Sounds like some middle manager will retire this even before
| launch so they can replace it with Google Axion CPU or some
| meaningless name change
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Summary: no timelines, no specifics, NOT a custom core (just
| neoverse), benchmarks with no references.
| jsheard wrote:
| Nonetheless, Intel and AMD must be sweating as another
| hyperscaler breaks away from using x86 exclusively.
| mtmail wrote:
| They probably already knew it was coming. Announcing it 2
| weeks before Alphabet/Google quarterly results might be
| timed.
| jsnell wrote:
| It's obviously timed to the Google Cloud Next conference,
| which starts today.
| refulgentis wrote:
| The 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
| osnium123 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Intel 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| cmpxchg8b wrote:
| I doubt it, Google has been using Ampere for some time.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| Right, 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
| mtmail wrote:
| Eight 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 wrote:
| Downside 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 wrote:
| As 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.
| thebytefairy wrote:
| In what ways? In my experience I've found GCP to easiest to use
| redman25 wrote:
| Feels 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 wrote:
| yeah 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.
| shrubble wrote:
| It's not about easiest to use but the way in which problems
| are handled. I am aware of case where something failed after
| being assured it would work by GCP ... when they got someone
| a GCP tech lead on the video call he started by saying it was
| all 'best effort' and that it might take several days to
| resolve. Ultimately it was fixed in 8 hours but that sort of
| laissez-faire attitude has led to the company in question
| making plans to go elsewhere.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| How do you do, fellow "gluing neoverse cores to synopsys IP"
| hyperscalers?
| cmpxchg8b wrote:
| We walk among you
| bgnn wrote:
| Synopsys should make its on to stop all this nonsense zt this
| point.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| LMAO
|
| Azure / AWS / Ampere silicon are all Neoverse wrappers,
| amirite?
| martinpw wrote:
| Looks like GCP has been using ARM processors from Ampere since
| mid 2022:
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tau-t2a-is-fi...
|
| So I guess this may be the end for Ampere on GCP?
| xyst wrote:
| I'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)
| qhwudbebd wrote:
| Looks like it's cloud-scam only, rather than a product one can
| actually buy and own?
| sofixa wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| All 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 wrote:
| Graviton2 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.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Google. See https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/go
| ogle-2023-e... and below.
| synack wrote:
| Google published PUE
| (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 wrote:
| Why vendor lock-in? It even uses the same CPU core as
| Graviton4, so it's clearly quite a fungible offering to me.
| synack wrote:
| By lock-in, I'm referring to my EC2 committed use savings
| plan that would prevent me from considering migrating to GCP
| until it expires next year, even if Google's instances are
| quantifiably better.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Why are you grousing about vendor lock in when you chose to
| sign an extended contract to get a better deal? You locked
| it in for them.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I'm curious to see when Apple will migrate off AWS and run their
| own datacenters on their own ARM socs
| ericlewis wrote:
| Xcode cloud isn't running on Apple silicon, arguably a place
| where it would make tons of sense.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| That does not make any sense
| ein0p wrote:
| It's not at all a given that this would be profitable. Apple is
| not paying the same prices for AWS/GCP that mere mortals do.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well they're paying minimum 30 mil per month until this year
| ein0p wrote:
| I think it's a heck of a lot more than that. 30 million
| seems puny compared to the revenue their services
| businesses generates. Though to be fair much of it probably
| doesn't run on public clouds.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| From what I understood is that everything runs on public
| clouds. They tried Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Sooo
| they should have enough experience by now.
|
| The contract was 1.5B over 5 years
| refulgentis wrote:
| Sourcing here is 2019 article about just one AWS
| contract. Apple also uses Google Cloud and Azure
| extensively, not just tryouts, they were one of Google
| Cloud's biggest customers. They are also building their
| own data centers. (TL;DR it's much more complicated than
| these comments would indicate at their face)
| tudorw wrote:
| Working hard to avoid lock-ins, how the other half lives.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I wonder if this is part of their new SoC chips they've been
| building to replace tensor on the pixel line.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| What'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 wrote:
| If I had to guess, it's because its a hardware change... like
| you're doing better at implementing software on physics :P
| the_panopticon wrote:
| There is a lot of room in the periodic table, too, as MS showed
| starting with https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-azure-
| cobalt-100-128-...
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| Generic names are often used to avoid copyright and trademark
| strikes. Other easy naming schemes are rivers, minerals,
| cities,...
| amelius wrote:
| Is "Tesla" a generic name too?
| tekla wrote:
| Yes
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| With 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
| soulbadguy wrote:
| PC 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| If 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.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Dell and Microsoft has been shipping ARM laptops for years.
|
| Creating an ARM cpu is ok but will they copy the entire M*
| architecture?
| LettuceSand12 wrote:
| Aren't all of these ARM chips? Why is compatibility such a big
| issue?
| astrange wrote:
| It isn't a big issue. But ARM doesn't have a universal boot
| loader/device discovery/etc standard like EFI/ACPI, so there
| is some more work to support them.
| jonmasters wrote:
| Arm servers do precisely have exactly that set of standards
| ((U)EFI/ACPI). See Arm SystemReady. You'll notice in the
| blog linked above that it mentions Arm SystemReady-VE,
| which uses those standards.
| Aurornis wrote:
| These are ARM processors using standard ARM instruction sets.
|
| I don't see any lock in here.
| soulbadguy wrote:
| Another 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 wrote:
| Doesn't TSMC just fab?
|
| They seem to be doing just fine.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| TSMC 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-...
| parasense wrote:
| > 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > You might see a cartel form instead of a competative
| market place, which is a setup where the higher margin is
| protected.
|
| Wouldn't it more likely be that players just carve out
| niches for themselves in the high-end space where they
| DON'T compete?
|
| If you're Intel - it seems like a fools errand to spend
| $50B to _maybe_ take some of TSMC 's customers.
|
| You'd probably rather spend $10B to create a new market -
| which although smaller - you can dominate, and might
| become a lot larger if you execute well.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I figured you'd see margin compression from the major,
| volume-limited buyers: e.g. Apple, Nvidia, etc.
|
| Paying a premium to get a quota with TSMC looks
| different, if there's competitive capacity, at least for
| large customers who can afford to retask their design
| teams to target a different process.
|
| Even if only as a credible stalking horse in pricing
| negotiations with TSMC.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| They're accelerating networking and block storage. Do you use
| those?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Of 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 wrote:
| It appears to me that Google is just matching what AWS
| Nitro did years ago.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That'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.
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