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staff@insideAI News
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Google Cloud has unveiled its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), named Ironwood, at the recent Google Cloud Next 2025 conference. This new custom AI accelerator is specifically designed for inference workloads, marking a shift in Google's AI chip development strategy. Ironwood aims to meet the growing demands of "thinking models" like Gemini 2.5, addressing the increasing shift from model training to inference observed across the industry. According to Amin Vahdat, Google's Vice President and General Manager of ML, Systems, and Cloud AI, the aim is to enter the "age of inference" where AI agents proactively retrieve and generate data for insights.
Ironwood's technical specifications are impressive, offering substantial computational power and efficiency. When scaled to a pod of 9,216 chips, it can deliver 42.5 exaflops of compute, surpassing the world's fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, by more than 24 times. Each individual Ironwood chip boasts a peak compute of 4,614 teraflops. To manage the communication demands of modern AI, each Ironwood setup features Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) networking spanning nearly 10 MW and each chip is equipped with 192GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and memory bandwidth that reaches 7.2 terabits per second.
This focus on inference is a response to the evolving AI landscape where proactive AI agents are becoming more prevalent. Ironwood is engineered to minimize data movement and latency on-chip while executing massive tensor manipulations, crucial for handling large language models and advanced reasoning tasks. Google emphasizes that Ironwood offers twice the performance per watt compared to its predecessor, Trillium, and is nearly 30 times more power efficient than Google’s first Cloud TPU from 2018, addressing the critical need for power efficiency in modern data centers.
ImgSrc: insideainews.co
References :
Ironwood's technical specifications are impressive, offering substantial computational power and efficiency. When scaled to a pod of 9,216 chips, it can deliver 42.5 exaflops of compute, surpassing the world's fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, by more than 24 times. Each individual Ironwood chip boasts a peak compute of 4,614 teraflops. To manage the communication demands of modern AI, each Ironwood setup features Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) networking spanning nearly 10 MW and each chip is equipped with 192GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and memory bandwidth that reaches 7.2 terabits per second.
This focus on inference is a response to the evolving AI landscape where proactive AI agents are becoming more prevalent. Ironwood is engineered to minimize data movement and latency on-chip while executing massive tensor manipulations, crucial for handling large language models and advanced reasoning tasks. Google emphasizes that Ironwood offers twice the performance per watt compared to its predecessor, Trillium, and is nearly 30 times more power efficient than Google’s first Cloud TPU from 2018, addressing the critical need for power efficiency in modern data centers.
ImgSrc: insideainews.co
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References :
- insideAI News: Google Launches ‘Ironwood’ 7th Gen TPU for Inference
- venturebeat.com: Google's new Ironwood chip is 24x more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer
- www.bigdatawire.com: Google Cloud Preps for Agentic AI Era with ‘Ironwood’ TPU, New Models and Software
- The Next Platform: With “Ironwood†TPU, Google Pushes The AI Accelerator To The Floor
- www.itpro.com: Google Cloud Next 2025: Targeting easy AI
Classification:
- HashTags: #GoogleCloudNext #IronwoodTPU #AgenticAI
- Company: Google
- Target: Google Cloud Customers
- Product: GKE
- Feature: Inference
- Type: AI
- Severity: Informative