"Google has revealed it's ported around 30,000 of its production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert them all so it can run workloads on both its own Axion silicon and x86 processors. 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."
""At first, we migrated some of our top jobs like F1, Spanner, and Bigtable using typical software practices, complete with weekly meetings and dedicated engineers," the pair wrote. "In this early period, we found evidence of the above issues, but not nearly as many as we expected. It turns out modern compilers and tools like sanitizers have shaken out most of the surprises.""
Google ported around 30,000 production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert all packages so workloads can run on both Axion Arm CPUs and x86 processors. YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both architectures. Migration began with expectations of issues such as floating-point drift, concurrency, platform-specific intrinsics, and performance, but many problems were avoided due to modern compilers and sanitizers. Initial migrations included F1, Spanner, and Bigtable using standard practices and dedicated engineers. Most engineering time focused on fixing tests that overfit to x86, updating legacy build and release systems, resolving rollout issues, and protecting critical systems. Existing automation was repurposed and an AI tool named CogniPort was created to address build and test errors and tasks beyond prior tooling.
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