Google's Axion ARM CPU Benchmarked Against x86 Rivals
Phoronix benchmarked Google's ARM-based Axion CPU against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors on the Google Cloud N4 platform. Results showed AMD was approximately 35% faster in some CPU-bound tasks, while Intel demonstrated a lead in memory and I/O performance, offering a mixed-performance landscape for datacenter chips.
- Google's Axion processor is built on Arm's Neoverse V2 CPU architecture, the same foundation used by competitors like Amazon for its Graviton4 CPU and Nvidia for its Grace CPU. - The Axion CPU is part of a broader system-on-a-chip architecture Google calls "Titanium," which uses dedicated microcontrollers to offload tasks like networking, security, and storage I/O processing, freeing up the main CPU cores for general-purpose workloads. - Google claims that Axion offers up to 50% better performance and up to 60% improved energy efficiency when compared to similar current-generation x86-based instances in its cloud. - The N4 platform referenced is a family of general-purpose instances; besides the Axion-powered N4A, Google Cloud also offers the N4 with Intel Xeon "Emerald Rapids" CPUs and the N4D with AMD EPYC "Turin" processors. - A broader Phoronix benchmark suite across 70 different tests found that, for a 16 vCPU instance, the AMD EPYC Turin-powered N4D was about 18% faster than the Axion-powered N4A overall. - In the same 16 vCPU comparison, the Axion N4A instance was roughly 18% faster than the Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids-powered N4 instance and had a lower hourly cost. - The performance difference in the 16 vCPU benchmarks is influenced by core topology; the Axion N4A instance utilized 16 physical cores, whereas the comparable AMD and Intel N4 instances used 8 physical cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) or Hyper-Threading. - This move makes Google the latest major cloud provider to design its own Arm-based data center CPUs, following Amazon's Graviton series and Microsoft's Azure Cobalt, signaling a major trend away from reliance on third-party x86 vendors.
