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Title: Google Porting All Internal Workloads To Arm

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/22/...

Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its
custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery
already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and
ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled
"Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that
reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion
Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain
Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy
Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with
an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences
such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-
specific operators, and performance." [...] The post and paper detail work on
30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google
pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI
tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google
found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain
conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and
data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google
has at least another 70,000 packages to port. The company's aim is to finish
the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can
allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers.
Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered
machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86
instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and
the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need
fewer x86 processors in years to come.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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