Google is trying to make cloud computing more affordable with a custom-built Arm -based server chip. With the new Arm-based chip, Google is playing catch-up with rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, which have been employing a similar strategy for years. Google has used Arm-based server computers for internal purposes to run YouTube advertising, the BigTable and Spanner databases and the BigQuery data analytics tool. Arm chips, which are popular in smartphones, offer a shorter set of instructions than x86 chips, which are commonly found in PCs. Axion offers 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based virtual machines in the cloud and 50% better performance than than comparable VMs based on x86, Google said.

---

Persons: Chirag, Gartner, Graviton, Alibaba, Thomas Kurian, Dekate, Christina Malbon Organizations: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Gartner, Amazon Web Services, Chirag Dekate, CNBC, Oracle, Arm Holdings, AMD, Intel Locations: Las Vegas, Sprinklr