KI-Chips: Google bringt Trillium-TPUs in die Cloud
Google is advertising its latest AI chips with four times the training performance of its predecessor. Cloud customers can now book instances with the TPU.
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Google Cloud customers can now use the sixth generation of Trillium TPUs. The chip, also known as v6e, is used for training and providing artificial intelligence. Google promises higher performance, bandwidth and energy efficiency compared to the previous chip generation. The company announced the chip generation back in spring and has since used it in the development of the second iteration of its in-house AI model Gemini, which is currently available as an experimental version.
Trillium offers four times the computing power
As with the v5e chip, customers can use Trillium TPUs to train, tune and deploy transformers, text-to-image generators and convolutional neural networks. Compared to its predecessor, the performance data of the Trillium TPU is said to enable four times the training performance of AI models and three times the inference throughput. At the same time, Google advertises the v6e accelerators as being 67 percent more energy efficient.
Google puts the computing power for 16-bit floating point numbers for Trillium accelerators at 918 teraflops, while v5e chips achieve 197 teraflops. A v6e pod with 256 chips thus achieves around 235 petaflops. The values for 8-bit integer calculations are twice as high. With a capacity of 32 gigabytes and a bandwidth of 1.6 terabits per second, Google has doubled the values of the high bandwidth memory. Each Trillium chip has a tensor core with two units for matrix multiplication (MXU) and one vector and one scalar unit. The tensor cores of the v5e chip contain four MXUs.
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Trillium instances twice as expensive as predecessors
In Europe, Google offers Trillium instances in the Amsterdam data center. On-demand, one chip hour costs 2.97 US dollars. For a guaranteed use of one year, the price is 2.08 US dollars, for three years it is 1.34 US dollars. Instances with the predecessor v5e cost around half as much. Dynamic prices apply for spot VMs. Other locations of Trillium instances are currently South Carolina, Ohio and Tokyo.
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