“Ironwood is the result of a continuous loop at Google where researchers influence hardware design, and hardware accelerates research. While competitors rely on external vendors, when Google DeepMind needs a specific architectural advancement for a model like Gemini, they collaborate directly with their TPU engineer counterparts. As a result, our models are trained on the newest TPU generations, often seeing significant speedups over previous hardware. Our researchers even use AI to design the next chip generation — a method called AlphaChip — which has used reinforcement learning to generate superior layouts for the last three TPU generations, including Ironwood.”
Source : 3 things to know about Ironwood, Google’s latest TPU