Google Porting All Internal Workloads To Arm (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0179852590
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/22/2022215/google-porting-all-internal-workloads-to-arm
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/google_multi_arch_x86_arm_port/
> The search and ads giant documented its move in a [2]preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday [3]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." [...]
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> 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.
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> 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.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/google_multi_arch_x86_arm_port/
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14928
[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/using-ai-and-automation-to-migrate-between-instruction-sets/
On one hand (Score:3)
It is great to be platform agnostic. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that the difference in energy consumption between x86-64 and ARM is significant enough to be a concern at Google, considering their market cap is literally three trillion dollars now.
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't need to be. There are other reasons to wean off x86.
Re: On one hand (Score:4, Insightful)
At Google's scale, a 1% reduction is an extra data center.
Re: (Score:2)
Google makes so much money even their enormous electricity bill is probably only a small fraction of profit, yes. But if they can cut the amount of power they use, they can add more compute without having to increase the amount of electrical capacity in a data center (or build more data centers), which not only means less capital expense but also means they can increase compute in less time. So it's definitely a concern.
Qualcomm is Missing Out (Score:2)
Qualcomm is really missing out by not supporting open source. They could dominate the datacenter business.
Re: (Score:2)
Which mainstream AI packages don't support Strix Halo?
How about emulators for Windows on Arm? (Score:1)
Would love to have Android emulators that run on Windows on Arm chips.
Left out the most relevant part of the story! (Score:4, Informative)
The most relevant part of this story is that it is incredibly easy for Google to do this kind of porting because THEY RUN LINUX.
Linux reliably supports these multiple architectures so easily that many major distributions have x86 and ARM versions ready for download.
Big internet companies have made so much money over the last two decades running Linux that it boggles the mind.
Re: (Score:2)
Linus should be the Richest Man on Earth based on his contributions to the world. That is... if things were fair, and contributions were actually rewarded instead of selfishness.
with 70000 packages remaining... (Score:2)
... Google will finish the migration from X86 to ARM right in time to start the migration from ARM to RISC-V . after all, price/performance will go over 65% if google does not have to pay royalties to ARM
Re:with 70000 packages remaining... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm someone who's handled a few hundred packages porting to ARM, not at google, but in the F/OSS community. The reality isn't "porting to ARM", its "porting away from X86", removing or gating x86-isms. The work to port to ARM is 95% already the same work needed to port to RISC-V. The main difference in hardware platforms is when dealing w/ hardware level crypto instructions or vector instructions, but again these are gated in libraries, and adding in the gates for ARM gives the vast majority of the work already needed for RISC-V.