Google just launched its seventh AI chip called Ironwood to make AI apps run better. This new processor helps computers quickly answer questions for chatbots and create other AI results. Ironwood stands as one of the few real competitors to NVIDIA's popular AI chips after Google spent billions developing it over ten years. Google only offers these tensor processing units through their cloud service or to people working at Google. They designed these special chips to work much faster than regular computer chips for AI tasks.
The new Ironwood chip combines features that used to require separate chips and includes more memory space. Google's Vice President Amin Vahdat said these chips can work together in groups of up to 9,216 processors. Ironwood uses half the energy to deliver the same performance compared to last year's Trillium chip. When all 9,216 chips work together, they create 42.5 Exaflops of computing power. This makes Ironwood more than 24 times stronger than El Capitan, which currently ranks as the world's most powerful supercomputer at only 1.7 Exaflops.
Ironwood chips offer impressive technical improvements across the board. Each chip holds 192 GB of memory, six times more than the previous Trillium version. The memory bandwidth reaches 7.2 Tbps per chip, 4.5 times faster than before. Google also improved how these chips talk to each other, increasing the connection speed to 1.2 Tbps in both directions. This represents a speed boost of 1.5 times compared to earlier models.
Google uses these custom-designed chips to build and run its Gemini AI models. The company keeps secret which manufacturer actually produces these Google-designed processors. These specialized chips help Google compete against other tech companies making AI products. The huge computing power lets Google create more advanced AI systems that can handle complex tasks. Computer experts consider this an important step forward for AI technology.
The new Ironwood chip combines features that used to require separate chips and includes more memory space. Google's Vice President Amin Vahdat said these chips can work together in groups of up to 9,216 processors. Ironwood uses half the energy to deliver the same performance compared to last year's Trillium chip. When all 9,216 chips work together, they create 42.5 Exaflops of computing power. This makes Ironwood more than 24 times stronger than El Capitan, which currently ranks as the world's most powerful supercomputer at only 1.7 Exaflops.
Ironwood chips offer impressive technical improvements across the board. Each chip holds 192 GB of memory, six times more than the previous Trillium version. The memory bandwidth reaches 7.2 Tbps per chip, 4.5 times faster than before. Google also improved how these chips talk to each other, increasing the connection speed to 1.2 Tbps in both directions. This represents a speed boost of 1.5 times compared to earlier models.
Google uses these custom-designed chips to build and run its Gemini AI models. The company keeps secret which manufacturer actually produces these Google-designed processors. These specialized chips help Google compete against other tech companies making AI products. The huge computing power lets Google create more advanced AI systems that can handle complex tasks. Computer experts consider this an important step forward for AI technology.
