Google has recently unveiled its latest AI chip, named Ironwood, which promises to significantly enhance the company’s AI capabilities. These advanced chips are crucial for powering AI systems, as the performance of an AI agent is directly linked to the hardware it runs on. In recent years, Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market, but companies like Google are committed to creating their own powerful alternatives. Google has invested years into developing its AI processing units, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

These chips serve as the foundational technology behind many of Google’s AI services and products, including the Pixel devices. With each new iteration, Google typically showcases substantial improvements, and the Ironwood chip is no exception. The Ironwood architecture represents the seventh generation of AI chips from Google. This new chip takes over from the TPU v5p released in 2023 and is designed to deliver an impressive boost in performance.

Ironwood features pods containing 9,216 chips, a notable increase from the 9,860 chips in the TPU v5p pods. Furthermore, Ironwood boasts 192GB of memory, which is a remarkable 102% increase over its predecessor’s 95GB. In terms of processing power, Ironwood exhibits more than ten times the TFLOPS of TPU v5p, achieving a staggering 4.614 Exaflops compared to the 459 TFLOPS of the earlier chip. Interestingly, Google has not positioned Ironwood as a direct competitor to the 2024 chip, Trilium, stating that Ironwood is mainly an advancement over TPU v5p.

Instead, they view Trilium as a follow-up to the less powerful TPU 5pe. This strategic approach signals Google’s intention to solidify its leadership in AI technology through continuous innovation in chip design.