Google broadens its AI hardware portfolio with two new specialized chips

Google is notching up its chipmaking crippled arsenic the institution seeks to trim its dependence connected chips made by different companies for its unreality computing business. Google connected Monday unveiled 2 caller variants of its tensor processing units (TPUs), in-house developed chips meant for AI workloads, that broaden its spot portfolio to further usage cases: confidential inference and much representation capableness for ample workloads.

The caller units, TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max, are portion of the company’s eighth procreation of chips introduced successful April this year, and physique connected what those chips offered, which was much inference capableness and enactment for ample grooming requirements.

TPU 8tx, designed with AMD, is based connected the TPU 8t chip, and is geared specifically for confidentially grooming and moving AI models, Google said successful a blog post. The spot “builds information straight into the hardware layer, keeping delicate information and exemplary weights protected and isolated adjacent portion successful progressive use,” the institution wrote.

The spot besides has a customized inferencing web that lets it tally reasoning alongside training, truthful it tin beryllium utilized to distill and bid tiny models connected the fly. That ability, according to Google, could beryllium utile for cases wherever a institution mightiness privation to bid a exemplary connected its proprietary information without having to determination the information betwixt devices.

Meanwhile, TPU 8i Max fundamentally combines 2 of the inference-focused TPU 8i chips the institution launched successful April, doubling the representation capacity, processing powerfulness and bandwidth, but successful a azygous package. The effect is simply a spot that lets AI models grip a larger scope of accusation during queries.

The spot motorboat comes arsenic hyperscalers similar Microsoft, Amazon, and adjacent AI labs similar OpenAI and Anthropic are moving connected their ain lines of AI-specific semiconductors and accompanying software successful bid to trim their reliance connected the dominance of Nvidia.

The quality besides comes astatine a peculiarly susceptible infinitesimal for Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang implicit the play admitted to having an affair with idiosyncratic alleged to beryllium a Chinese spy.