Google Launches Ironwood, its 7th-Gen TPU for AI Inference
Executive Summary
Google has announced the general availability of Ironwood, its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), for its Cloud customers. This custom silicon is purpose-built for the age of AI inference, designed to run large-scale models with high volume and low latency. Ironwood delivers a greater than 4X performance improvement over the previous generation and is a core component of Google's integrated "AI Hypercomputer" supercomputing system.
Key Takeaways
* Product: Ironwood, Google's seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).
* Primary Function: To power high-volume, low-latency AI inference and model serving workloads at scale.
* Performance: Offers over four times the performance per chip for both training and inference compared to the previous generation.
* Scalability: As part of the AI Hypercomputer system, Ironwood can scale up to 9,216 interconnected chips in a single "superpod".
* Architecture: Features a 9.6 Tb/s Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) network, allowing thousands of chips to access 1.77 Petabytes of shared High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).
* AI-Driven Design: The chip's physical layout was designed with assistance from an AI method called "AlphaChip," which uses reinforcement learning.
* Availability: Ironwood is now available for Google Cloud customers.
Strategic Importance
This launch reinforces Google's vertically integrated AI strategy by providing a powerful, in-house hardware solution that offers customers a highly efficient alternative to third-party GPUs for demanding AI inference workloads.