That doesn’t mean it will be all plain sailing for Google and its TPU customers, though: Myron Xie, a research analyst at SemiAnalysis, warned that Google might also face constraints in terms of chip manufacturing capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is facing bottlenecks around limited capacity for advanced chip packaging.
Designed for TensorFlow
Ironwood is the seventh generation of Google’s TPU platform, and was designed alongside TensorFlow, Google’s open-source machine learning framework.
That gives the chips an edge over GPUs in general for common in AI workloads built for TensorFlow, said Omdia principal analyst Alexander Harrowell. Many AI models, especially in research and enterprise scenarios, are built using TensorFlow, he said, and the TPUs are highly optimized for such operations while general-purpose GPUs that support multiple frameworks aren’t as specialized.
