Alphabet Focuses on Efficiency with New AI Chip
While Nvidia's data center GPUs are widely used to run artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, 's (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google has been working on its own custom AI chips for years. The company's Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, was first announced in 2016. Its fourth-generation TPU, the TPU v4, became available for use by Google Cloud customers last year.
The benefit of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is that it can be designed at the hardware level to perform specific tasks. A GPU is more general purpose, making it useful for a wide variety of workloads in addition to AI, but potentially less efficient. Google claims that its TPU v4 beats Nvidia's last-gen A100 data center GPU on a variety of AI workloads.
Nvidia launched its ultra-power H100 data center GPU in 2022, and that hardware has become the standard for AI workloads. Nvidia is selling every H100 GPU it can make, and reports indicate that the company is set to triple production of data center GPUs in 2024. Right now, there's nothing faster for AI than the H100.
Source Fool.com