TECH NEWS – Axion is the name of Google’s first unique ARM-based chip, but we can expect more powerful hardware from the company later (artificial intelligence requires more powerful chips).

Nevertheless, at Cloud Next 2024, Google announced a system-on-a-chip (SoC) for data centers, which could be the start of the expansion into in-house chip manufacturing. Axion is a new TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) v5p for pods that can run up to 8960 chips at once. Google says it is capable of twice the performance of the previous generation TPU, and also heats up to lower temperatures at peak performance. Google uses water cooling, and Mark Lohmeyer, general manager and vice president of computing and machine learning at Google Cloud, said they have made it easier for customers to migrate their workloads to ARM. Axion is built on an open platform, making it easier for customers using ARM to adopt the technology because they don’t have to rewrite code.

Axion is said to deliver 50% better performance than current x86 virtual machines while consuming 60% less power. Axion can deliver 30% better performance than the fastest ARM-based cloud services SoCs. Axion is currently running on several Google services, including Google Cloud to power YouTube ads.

The company plans to take Axion public sometime this year and has not yet disclosed who bought the chip. What is certain, however, is that with the announcement of Axion, Google will be using a completely unique Tensor silicon in future Pixel smartphones and tablets. Previous rumors suggested that Google would use TSMC’s 3-nanometer N3E process for the Tensor G6, and that a custom GPU would be produced in addition to the in-house processor cores.

So it’s not the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro that will get the Axion, but it will show up in hardware that’s not very relevant to us.

Source: WCCFTech