Ironwood (AI processor)

History

2025: Product Announcement

On April 9, 2025, Google announced the creation of the world's most powerful chip for artificial intelligence tasks. A product called Ironwood can perform 4.614 trillion operations per second (Tflops).

Ironwood is processor a seventh generation tensor processing unit (TPU). The solution contains 192 GB of HBM memory, the bandwidth of which reaches 7.2 TB/s. It is claimed that TPU is designed in accordance with the computational and communication requirements of the so-called "thinking models," which include large language models (), LLM mixed expert models (MoE) and complex "reasoning" models.

𝓲

Фото: Google

Ironwood-based cloud solutions, depending on the requirements of the AI workload, can be configured with 256 and 9216 chips. In the second case, the total performance reaches 42.5 Eflops. This, as noted by Google, is 24 times more than the most powerful supercomputer in the world as of April 2025 - the El Capitan system, which has a performance of 1,742 Eflops.

The product is equipped with an improved SparseCore unit - a specialized accelerator for working with AI models that are used in ranking and recommendation systems. This allows you to accelerate a wide range of workloads that go beyond traditional AI tasks and cover financial and scientific areas. Ironwood's memory and network architecture, according to the developer, ensures that the right data is always available to support peak performance on a huge scale. The Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) with a bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s in two directions is involved. The liquid cooling system is responsible for heat removal.^[1]

Notes