Think of Ironwood as a super-smart, energy-saving brain for AI systems. It’s Google’s latest chip—officially their seventh version of what they call a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)—and it’s built to help AI do its job faster and smarter, especially when it’s figuring things out on the fly, like answering your questions or making predictions. This “figuring out” part is what tech folks call “inference,” and Ironwood is designed specifically for that, unlike older chips that also focused on training AI from scratch.
Ironwood is like a turbocharged librarian who can quickly find and summarize books for you. It’s got a ton of memory—192 gigabytes per chip, which is six times more than its predecessor, Trillium. It moves data super fast too, with a speed of 7.2 terabits per second, about 4.5 times quicker than its predecessor. And it’s a team player: you can link up to 9,216 of these chips together, creating a massive brain that delivers 42.5 exaflops of power. That’s a crazy big number—24 times more than the world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan!
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The cool part? It’s also way more energy-efficient—twice as efficient as Trillium per watt of power, and nearly 30 times better than Google’s first TPU from years back. So, it’s like a high-performance car that uses less gas. It even has a special feature called SparseCore, which is like a shortcut for handling big, messy data sets—like figuring out what you might want to buy online or solving complex science problems.
Ironwood is Google’s big step into making AI that thinks faster, uses less power, and tackles tougher tasks. It’ll be available later this year for their cloud customers, so businesses and developers can use it to power all sorts of smart tech.
