SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google on Tuesday revealed the details of a new version of its data center artificial intelligence chips and announced an Arm-based based central processor.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) are one of the few viable alternatives to the advanced AI chips made by Nvidia, though developers can only access them through Google's Cloud Platform and not buy them directly.

Google plans to offer the Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) called Axion via Google Cloud. The company said it has superior performance to x86 chips, and general-purpose Arm chips in the cloud.

KEY QUOTE(S)

"We're making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm," said Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud's vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure. "Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without re-architecting or re-writing their apps."

CONTEXT

Rival cloud operators such as Amazon.com and Microsoft have built Arm CPUs as a way of differentiating the computing services they offer. Google has built other custom chips for YouTube, AI and its smartphones but had not built a CPU.