Skip to main content

Google is rapidly turning into a formidable opponent to BFF Nvidia — the TPU v5p AI chip powering its hypercomputer is faster and has more memory and bandwidth than ever before, beating even the mighty H100

Google accompanied the recent launch of its Gemini AI models with the latest version of its flagship tensor processing unit (TPU) for AI training and inference, in what appears to be an attempt to take on Nvidia's own market-leading GPUs.

TPU v5p – Google's most powerful custom-designed AI accelerator – has been deployed to power the firm's 'AI Hypercomputer'. This is a supercomputing architecture that's built specifically to run AI applications, rather than supercomputers which normally run scientific workloads, because TPUs are unsuited to this.

The latest version of its TPU has 8,960 chips per pod (which comprise the system), versus 4,096 in v4, and it's four times as scalable in terms of total availability of FLOPs per pod. These new pods provide a throughput of 4,800Gbps. The new pods also have 95GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) versus 32GB HBM RAM in TPU v4. 

Nvidia H100 vs Google TPU v5p: Which is faster?

Unlike Nvidia, which offers its GPUs out for other companies to purchase, Google's custom-made TPUs remain in-house for use across its own products and services. Google's TPUs have long been used to power its services including Gmail, YouTube and Android, and the latest version has also been used to train Gemini. 

Google's v5p TPUs are up to 2.8 times faster at training large language models than TPU v4, and offer 2.1-times value-for-money. Although the intermediary version, TPU v5e, released earlier this year, offers the most value for money of all three, it's only up to 1.9-times faster than TPU v4, making TPU v5p the most powerful.

It's even powerful enough to rival Nvidia's widely in-demand H100 GPU, which is one of the best graphics cards out there for AI workloads. This component is four times faster at training workloads than Nvidia's A100 GPU, according to the company's own data. 

Google's TPU v4, meanwhile, is estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.7-times faster than the A100, according to research it published in April. Incredibly rough calculations would suggest the TPU v5p, therefore, is roughly between 3.4 and 4.8-times faster than the A100 – which makes it on par or superior to the H100, although more detailed benchmarking is needed before any conclusions can be drawn.

More from TechRadar Pro



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TechRadar's Year in Review: AI revolution, smartphone evolution, and visions of the future

If I had to sum up 2023 in one word it would be AI. Okay, technically that’s two initials, but let’s not quibble – because there’s no doubt that it provided the year in tech with its main story arc. Artificial intelligence was everywhere this year, as every company in the world gawped at the massive impact of ChatGPT, and decided they wanted to jump aboard that bandwagon. You could barely move for new chatbots, new image generators, and new AI-enhanced features in every device released in 2023. And there’s no sign of that changing in 2024; in fact, we expect it to be an even bigger deal. Elsewhere, phones and laptops did much the same as they had the previous year – well, except where they had new AI-enhanced features – so it was in the virtual reality space where bigger changes were afoot. If the Meta Quest 3 was impressive then the Apple Vision Pro looks to be genuinely game-changing, and we can’t wait to see what impact it has in the next 12 months. Of course we also saw plenty ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microsoft and Sony enter "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation

Microsoft has announced that it has reached a "binding agreement" with Sony, pledging to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.  With Microsoft having won its anti-trust case with the US Federal Trade Commission , its planned acquisition of Call of Duty developers Activision Blizzard has taken a big step closer to becoming a reality. In order to alleviate the concerns of monopoly-building that got Microsoft in legal hot water to begin with, the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, announced yesterday via Tweet that it has entered into an "agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation."  This agreement will no doubt come as a relief to fans concerned that Microsoft's acquisition plans might result in Call of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive, following in the footsteps of future Bethesda releases. Since Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda caused the studio to break its tradition of offering titles cross-platform for upcomi...
Post a Comment
Read more

This Stardew Valley-like farming sim plays at the bottom of your screen so you work and play at the same time

Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing are among some of the best choices out there if you're looking for a game to get swept up in for hours at a time. But, if you're a fan of management sims and a multitasker as well, this upcoming farming sim will likely pique your interest.  Developed by Mister Morris Games, Rusty's Retirement is an idle-farming simulation game that runs at the bottom of your gaming monitor, allowing you to focus on other tasks like working while you tend to your crops. Set to release in Q1 2024 on Steam , the idle sim puts you in the shoes of a wholesome robot as you grow crops and use them to produce clean and energy-efficient biofuel. Having gathered this "vital robot power source," you'll then need to sell your harvest to the other machine inhabitants of your settlement. This, in turn, will let you reinvest the money into expanding your farm. If you're a terrible procrastinator (like me) this might not sound like your cup of tea...
Post a Comment
Read more