From HPC Wire, August 30:
The dominance of Nvidia GPUs has companies scrambling to find non-GPU alternatives, and another mainstream option has emerged with Google’s TPU v5e AI chip.
The TPU v5e is also Google’s first AI chip being mainstreamed with a suite of software and tools for large-scale orchestration of AI workloads in virtual environments. The AI chip is now available in preview to Google Cloud customers.
The new AI chip succeeds the previous-generation TPUv4, which was used to train the newer PaLM and PaLM 2 large language models used in Google search, mapping, and online productivity applications.
Google has often compared its TPUs to Nvidia’s GPUs but was cautious with the TPU v5e announcement. Google stressed it was focused on offering a variety of AI chips to its customers, with Nvidia’s H100 GPUs in the A3 supercomputer and TPU v5e for inferencing and training.
The Cloud TPU v5e is also the first Google AI chip available outside the US. The TPUv4 was available only in North America. The TPU v5e computers will be installed in the Netherlands for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) markets and in Singapore for the Asia-Pacific markets.
The origins of TPU v5 were mired in controversy. Researchers at Google informally announced TPU-v5 in June 2021 and, in a paper, said AI was used to design the chip. Google claimed that AI agents helped floor-plan the chip in under six hours faster than human experts. There were internal debates on the claims made in the paper, and Google fired one researcher ahead of the paper’s appearance in Nature magazine.
Academic researchers also called out Google’s claims and criticized the company for not opening it up for public scrutiny. A researcher, Andrew B. Kahng, from the University of California, San Diego, later reverse-engineered Google’s chip-design techniques and found that human chip designers and automated tools were sometimes faster than Google’s AI-only technique....
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