Google Takes the Leash Off Ironwood TPUs

Google made its Ironwood Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) generally available this week and showed off its massive "superpod," which features 9,216 Ironwood TPUs in a single system. The TPUs are Google's latest processors for AI workloads, competing with AMD, Nvidia, and others to satiate the world's rabid AI demand. The chips are designed for inference computing, such as when AI agents provide answers in response to questions from humans.

Ironwood TPUs are now Google's fastest AI chips, offering four times the performance of the TPU v6e, its immediate predecessor, and 10 times the performance of the TPU v5p. (That's for both training and inference.) The superpod has 9,216 Ironwood TPUs and Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) networking speeds as high as 9.6Tbps. Google says its superpod also features 1.77 PB of shared High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). The TPU cluster also features Google's custom ...