Alphabet (GOOGL) shares rose about 9% Wednesday after Google revealed its most advanced AI chip to date at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas.
The chip, dubbed Ironwood, is Google's seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) designed specifically for AI inference workloads. Google touted Ironwood as a significant step in generative AI, empowering systems to not only respond to queries but also proactively gather and interpret data.
Ironwood is available in two configurations: a 256-chip version and a larger 9,216-chip configuration. The higher-end setup is claimed to reach 42.5 exaflops for low-precision AI tasksa figure that far exceeds El Capitan's 2 exaflops in double-precision. However, this benchmark highlights the chip's AI specialization rather than offering a direct performance comparison across different workload types.
Each Ironwood chip delivers 4,614 teraflops and is backed by an advanced inter-chip interconnect with nearly 10 megawatts of capacity. Google also stated that Ironwood doubles the energy efficiency of its previous-generation Trillium TPU while boosting memory capacity sixfold to 192 GB per chip, with data bandwidth reaching 7.4 Tbps and interconnect speeds up to 1.2 Tbps bidirectional.
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