Tensor Processing Unit (TPU):
Google’s release of the Ironwood TPU comes at a pivotal moment as the global AI boom accelerates demand for faster, specialised compute. A Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed by Google specifically to accelerate machine learning—especially deep neural networks and matrix-heavy computations.TPUs were first deployed internally by Google in 2015 to run TensorFlow workloads and were released for external use via Google Cloud in 2018.TPUs use large matrix-multiply units (MXUs) capable of performing tens of thousands of multiply-accumulate operations per clock cycle. They process data in matrix form, breaking inputs into vectors, running them in parallel, and feeding results back to AI models.High-bandwidth memory and optimized interconnects enable extremely fast data movement for training large neural networks.
