Google’s new Ironwood chip is 24x more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer
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Summary
Google has unveiled its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom AI accelerator called Ironwood, which it claims delivers more than 24 times the computing power of the world’s fastest supercomputer when deployed at scale.
Google’s emphasis on inference, rather than just training models, marks a shift towards the deployment efficiency and reasoning capabilities of AI systems, which the company said is indicative of the industry’s move towards age of inference, where AI agents will proactively retrieve and generate data to collaboratively deliver insights and answers.
The company also unveiled an “agent-to-agent interoperability protocol” that enables AI agents built on different frameworks and by different vendors to communicate with each other, in a partnership with over 50 industry leaders, including Salesforce, ServiceNow and SAP.