Google said that one of the few alternatives to Nvidia’s popular AI chips is now available to developers — and took a shot at Microsoft and Amazon, too.
The tech giant’s latest AI chip, the Cloud TPU v5p, was first announced in December, the same day as its chatbot Gemini. The new TPU, or tensor processing unit, can train large language models almost three times faster than its predecessor, Google’s TPU v4, the company said. Large language models (LLMs) power AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
Google also unveiled its new, Arm-based central processing unit called Google Axion, a new rival to the CPUs of Microsoft and Amazon, which have already made their own Arm-based computing chips. The British tech company Arm licenses its chip infrastructure design for actual chip manufacturers to build upon. Google’s release of Axion marks the first time the company has used Arm’s chip infrastructure for a CPU.