Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud unit will start adopting computing chips based on technology from Arm, a British semiconductor and software design company, making it the latest company to join a transition that will take market share from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Google Cloud customers and developers have access to Tau T2A VMs, using the Ampere Altra CPU, based on the low-cost, energy efficient, and performance benefits of the Arm Neoverse N1 core.
The performance-per-watt benefits are now helping to drive significant advantages of the new Tau T2A VMs like exceptional single-threaded functioning, a compelling price, and broad support from operating systems, ISVs and Google Cloud services. In addition, Google Cloud has joined the Works on Arm initiative, ensuring developers to build, test and optimize projects on the Arm architecture at no cost for a trial period.
In the four years since, Arm’s technology, which it licenses to other companies to weave into complete chips, has shown up in data centers around the world, including those at Amazon.com, Microsoft and Oracle in the US and Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent in China.
Arm now touches nearly 70 percent of the population, from smartphones to wearables, laptops, IoT devices, 5G equipment and now, cloud servers. The long-standing collaboration between Arm and Google Cloud now spans enabling ultra-low power machine learning (ML) at the edge with tinyML, improving user experiences on Android, building a cleaner cloud with Tau T2A VMs, all while working together to set a higher standard for security from edge to cloud.
