Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud said it will adopt computing chips based on virtual machines (VM) from Arm Ltd, making it the latest company to join a transition that will take market share from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices.
Earlier in April, Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure had launched Arm.
The latest VMs, now in preview, will line up with Google Cloud’s Tau VM series under the ‘Tau T2A’ moniker. This series was launched with AMD Milan processors, providing affordability and efficiency.
Google stated, ”We are thrilled to announce the preview release of our first VM family based on the Arm architecture, Tau T2A. Powered by Ampere Altra Arm-based processors, T2A VMs deliver exceptional single-threaded performance at a compelling price.” Tau T2A VMs come in multiple predefined shapes, with up to 48 vCPUs per VM, and 4GB of memory per vCPU.
Arm, the British chip firm that plans to go public after a proposed acquisition by Nvidia Corp fell through earlier this year, has long supplied designs and other intellectual property that power chips for smartphones and tablets. In 2018, Arm started offering technology for chips used in data centres, a market dominated by Intel and AMD.
The recent line-up of VMs is currently available in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Arm's technology, which it licenses to other companies to weave into complete chips, is seen at data centres around the world, including those at Amazon.com , Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp in the US, and Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent Holdings Ltd in China.
These firms buy huge volumes of computing chips and then rent out the computing power to software developers via their paid cloud computing services. All of them continue to offer services based on chips from Intel and AMD. But now, nearly every major cloud provider, including Google recently, has at least a few offerings based on Arm.
Some cloud computing firms such as Amazon and Alibaba are designing their own Arm-based chips and having them manufactured by chip factories. Others including Google are turning to Ampere Computing, a chip firm founded by former Intel executives that has filed confidential paperwork with US securities regulators for an initial public offering.
Google said its new offering will be based on Ampere's "Altra" chips. Ampere also sells selling chips to Microsoft and Oracle, among others.