Google Launches Seventh Generation AI Chip “Ironwood” To Accelerate AI Apps

JAKARTA Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) on Wednesday 9 April announced the launch of their seventh-generation artificial intelligence chip named Ironwood. This chip is specifically designed to increase the speed of AI application performance such as chatbots and other artificial intelligence-based systems.

Ironwood is focused on computational inference, which is the process of processing the data needed when users ask questions to software such as ChatGPT. This type of computing allows the AI system to respond quickly and accurately.

Google’s efforts to develop this AI chip have lasted nearly a decade and cost billions of dollars in investment. Ironwood is one of the potential alternatives to Nvidia’s superstrong AI chip, which currently dominates the market.

Google uses its Internal Processing Unit (TPU) Tensor, and also offers access through their cloud services. This gives a competitive advantage in the development and provision of large model-based AI services such as Gemini.

Previously, Google separated its TPU chip line into two: one for building a large AI model from scratch, and another one optimized specifically for running an AI application (inference) at a lower cost.

Ironwood is the latest version that combines capabilities from the two previous lines, and is now designed to operate in large configurations of up to 9,216 chips simultaneously, according to Amind Vahdat, Google’s Vice President.

“Significance inference is getting bigger today,” Vahdat said in a chip launch conducted at Google’s cloud conference.

Ironwood chips offer double energy efficiency compared to previous chips, Trillium, which launched last year. Google uses these chips to build and run the AI Gemini model.

However, Google did not reveal who the chipmaker is producing this Ironwood design.

The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language.
(system supported by DigitalSiber.id)