Google launches new Ironwood chip to speed AI applications
SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab on Wednesday unveiled its seventh-generation artificial intelligence chip named Ironwood, which the company said is designed to speed the performance of AI applications.
The Ironwood processor is geared toward the type of data crunching needed when users query software such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Known in the tech industry as "inference" computing, the chips perform rapid calculations to render answers in a chatbot or generate other types of responses.
The search giant's multi-billion dollar, roughly decade-long effort represents one of the few viable alternative chips to Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab powerful AI processors.
Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) can only be used by the company's own engineers or through its cloud service and have given its internal AI effort an edge over some rivals.
For at least one generation Google split its TPU family of chips into a version that's tuned for building large AI models from scratch. Its engineers have made a second line of chips that strips out some of the model building features in favor of a chip that shaves costs of running AI applications.
The Ironwood chip is a model designed for running AI applications, or inference, and is designed to work in groups of as many as 9,216 chips, said Amind Vahdat, a Google vice president.
The new chip, unveiled at a cloud conference, brings functions from earlier split designs together and increases the available memory, which makes it better suited for serving AI applications.
"It's just that the relative importance of inference is going up significantly," Vahdat said.
The Ironwood chips boast double the performance for the amount of energy needed compared with Google's Trillium chip it announced last year, Vahdat said. The company builds and deploys its Gemini AI models with its own chips.
The company did not disclose which chip manufacturer is producing the Google design.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Google's $32 billion deal for Wiz gets antitrust review, Bloomberg News reports
June 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department antitrust enforcers are reviewing whether Google's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab planned acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz would illegally limit competition in the marketplace, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal, valued at about $32 billion, is Alphabet's largest acquisition to date. It will integrate Wiz into Google's cloud unit, enhancing the company's cybersecurity solutions to help businesses mitigate critical risks. Google, DOJ and Wiz did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
Reuters
3 hours ago
- Reuters
Exclusive: Crypto giants set for EU green light amid growing regulatory rift, sources say
PARIS/FRANKFURT, June 13 (Reuters) - Two of the world's largest cryptocurrency companies are poised to secure licences granting them access to operate across the European Union, as a rift grows among regulators over the speed and rigour of some countries' approvals, according to sources familiar with the matter. Under the EU's new Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, which came into force earlier this year, member states can issue licences that allow crypto companies to operate throughout the 27-nation bloc, but some have raised concerns in closed-door meetings about the speed with which licences are being granted, two people familiar with those discussions said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. At stake is the oversight of the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry, which regulators have long warned could facilitate fraud, market instability and illicit financial flows if it is not properly supervised. MiCA aims to bring crypto under the same regulatory umbrella as traditional finance, but some fear that uneven enforcement could undermine its goals. Gemini, a crypto trading platform founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, is on the verge of receiving a licence to operate from Malta, the smallest country in the European Union, two people said. This follows Malta's earlier approvals of OKX and granted within weeks of the new regime's introduction. The pace of Malta's approvals has drawn scrutiny from other national regulators, who meet under the umbrella of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). France's AMF has publicly warned that ESMA's lack of direct authority could lead to a "regulatory race to the bottom". Another senior regulatory official, who did not wish to be identified, said that they were concerned about accepting licences granted in countries where regulators had fewer staff, citing Malta as one example. ESMA has scrutinized Malta's licensing process, with a report due to be circulated in the near future, said one of those people. A spokesperson for the Malta Financial Services Authority said it had granted four crypto licences so far and was able to move fast due to its past experience, adding that "expedited processing" was due to its "in-depth understanding acquired over these years". It said its local money laundering standards were strict. ESMA declined to comment. OKX said its application was "rigorous" and that compliance was a priority. The regulatory debate has intensified with expectations that Luxembourg will soon grant a licence to Coinbase (COIN.O), opens new tab, the first U.S. crypto-focused company to join the S&P 500, one of the people said. While the application has been in progress for several months, one person pointed to the relatively modest size of Coinbase's planned operation in Luxembourg. A Coinbase spokesperson did not comment on its application but said it employed 200 in Europe and that it invested in staff to ensure operations were safe. The spokesperson said Luxembourg was a "high-bar, well respected global financial centre" and that Coinbase would hire more than 20 people there by the end of the year. Luxembourg's financial watchdog declined to comment. One person familiar with Luxembourg's thinking dismissed any suggestion that the country was lax and said some critics were rather motivated by self interest in a race to attract crypto firms. Coinbase's anticipated approval is seen as a setback for Ireland, where relations with the crypto industry have cooled. In 2023, Central Bank Governor Gabriel Makhlouf compared crypto to a Ponzi scheme, warning that 'most of the time when you gamble, you're actually losing.' The global cryptocurrency market is currently valued at roughly $3.3 trillion but it has seen crises, such as the collapse and fraud of top U.S. exchange FTX in 2022. The European Union has long had to contend with divergence between its members. The dispute is unfolding as European politicians consider granting greater powers to regulator ESMA. While the European Union is united as a trading bloc and writes much regulation centrally in Brussels, countries vie with each other to attract international businesses. ESMA head Verena Ross has also pushed publicly for more powers to oversee crypto, although one person familiar with discussions among EU politicians said several countries were sceptical.
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment.
