Google Just Unveiled Its Most Powerful AI Chip To-Date

Summary: Google just announced its new Ironwood AI chips. These are extremely powerful chips that will power the company’s AI tasks going forward.

An AI agent is only as smart as the hardware powering it. This is why companies pay top dollar for the most powerful chips on the market to drive their AI. Nvidia has seen a massive surge in popularity thanks to the whole AI boom, but other companies are developing their own AI chips.

Google has been developing its own AI chips for years. The processing units that the company uses will sound pretty familiar if you know about Google’s Pixel devices. They’re called TPUs (Tensor Processing Units). They are the building blocks to Google’s AI. While Google comes out with new AI chips every couple of years, its latest chip marks an exponential improvement over the company’s previous model.

Google announces its new Ironwood AI chip

Google’s AI is some of the smartest in the world, despite its numerous hiccups. This is because of the incredible amount of power behind the models. The company just took the wraps off of its 7th-gen AI chip architecture called Ironwood. It’s going to power Google’s AI tech going forward. Looking at this chip’s specs, we should expect a pretty big improvement to Google’s AI.

Back in 2023, Google released its chip called TPU v5p. This chip came in pods of 9860 chips, while Iron comes in pods of 9216 chips. This leads to a massive jump in overall capabilities. Ironwood has a staggering 192GB of memory, which is a 102% increase over TPU v5p (95GB). Also, Ironwood has more than 10x the TFLOPS than TPU v5p, capping out at 4.614 Exaflops compared to TPU v5p’s 459 TFLOPS.

One thing to note is that Google didn’t compare this new chip to 2024’s chip called Trilium. Google said that is because Ironwood is more of a successor to TPU v5p than Trilium. The company said that Trilium was a follow-up to a TPU 5pe, a less powerful chip.