All news with #ironwood tag

Google Cloud Announces Ironwood TPUs and Axion VMs

🚀 Google Cloud announced general availability of Ironwood, its seventh-generation TPU, alongside a new family of Arm-based Axion VMs. Ironwood is optimized for large-scale training, reinforcement learning, and high-volume, low-latency inference, with claims of 10x peak performance over TPU v5p and multi-fold efficiency gains versus TPU v6e (Trillium). The architecture supports superpods up to 9,216 chips, 9.6 Tb/s inter‑chip interconnect, up to 1.77 PB shared HBM, and Optical Circuit Switching for dynamic fabric routing. Complementary software and orchestration updates — including Cluster Director, MaxText improvements, vLLM support, and GKE Inference Gateway — aim to reduce time-to-first-token and serving costs, while Axion N4A/C4A instances provide ARM-based CPU options for cost-sensitive inference and data-prep workloads.