At this week’s Cloud Next conference, Google dropped a bombshell with the announcement of Ironwood, its latest TPU AI accelerator chip. This isn’t just any upgrade—it’s Google’s seventh-gen TPU and the first specifically fine-tuned for inference tasks. That means running AI models just got a whole lot faster and more efficient. 🚀
Ironwood is set to launch later this year for Google Cloud customers, available in two powerhouse configurations: a 256-chip cluster and a massive 9,216-chip cluster. According to Google Cloud VP Amin Vahdat, Ironwood is “our most powerful, capable, and energy-efficient TPU yet,” designed to handle inferential AI models at scale. 💰
The AI accelerator space is heating up, with giants like Amazon and Microsoft throwing their hats in the ring. But Google’s Ironwood isn’t just keeping up—it’s setting the pace. With a peak computing power of 4,614 TFLOPs, 192GB of dedicated RAM per chip, and bandwidth nearing 7.4 Tbps, Ironwood is built for speed. Plus, its enhanced SparseCore is perfect for advanced ranking and recommendation workloads, making it a dream for personalized AI applications.
Google’s also planning to integrate Ironwood with its AI Hypercomputer, a modular computing cluster in Google Cloud. Vahdat calls Ironwood “a unique breakthrough in the age of inference,” thanks to its computation power, memory capacity, and networking advancements. The future of AI inference is here, and it’s wearing Google’s colors.
