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TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max

原始链接: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-cloud/global-network/tpu-8i-max-and-8tx/

谷歌第八代TPU包含四款专用系统:用于训练的TPU 8t、用于低延迟推理的8i、用于机密计算的8tx,以及用于海量上下文与计算密度的8i Max。谷歌还通过TorchTPU原生支持PyTorch、vLLM/SGLang优化,以及TPU agent套件和XLA Serving Engine等工具,让开发者更易用TPU。软件改进包括InferenceX/AgentX基准测试的顶尖结果、用于挂起空闲agent会话的Agent Compute Engine,以及用于统一内存分层的TPU Sync。Cloud Pathways与GKE动态切片改善了分布式TPU编排与拓扑灵活性。硬件与软件协同设计共同旨在支持智能体AI生命周期的每个阶段。

Google 宣布了 TPU 8tx 和 8i Max,定位面向代理时代。该帖引发了 Hacker News 关于可用性和规格的讨论。评论者指出 Google 主要出租 TPU 而不是广泛销售它们,尽管一些客户如 Anthropic 和 Oracle 使用或将会使用它们。用户要求与 Nvidia 进行瓦特/令牌和美元/令牌比较,更清晰的规格,以及 Colab 访问更新的 TPU。其他人抱怨公告缺乏购买链接和技术细节,称其为营销。一些人辩论 TPU 是否应被解释为 Tensor Processing Units,以及缩写是否需要扩展。还有关于 Google 更广泛销售 TPU 和与 Nvidia 竞争的讨论。总体而言,该主题混合了对 Google AI 基础设施的兴趣,以及对有限消费者访问和稀疏性能数据的沮丧。
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原文

While flexible across workloads, together the four systems in our eighth-generation TPUs give customers a purpose-built accelerator for every stage of the agentic lifecycle. TPU 8t for scale-up training, TPU 8i for low-latency reasoning, TPU 8tx for confidential computing, and TPU 8i Max for massive context windows and the highest compute density per rack.

Opening up TPUs to every developer

When we launched the first TPU more than a decade ago, there were only a handful of companies running workloads that needed the processing power of a TPU. The use cases were specialized, so engineers would use optimized frameworks and hand-tuned code.

Over the years, as AI has advanced, more and more companies began using accelerators. Now, AI adoption is at a point where TPUs are excellent for a wide range of companies and use cases, and as a result, we’ve been working systematically to remove barriers to adoption so that TPUs are as easy-to-use as general-purpose hardware.

This investment comes together today across these key areas:

  • Opening up TPU development to every PyTorch developer; no code rewrites needed: Last month, we open-sourced TorchTPU, so PyTorch code and Hugging Face models now run natively on TPUs, alongside out-of-the-box TPU backends for leading open-source inference engines like vLLM and SGLang. And to make hardware optimization effortless, our new open-source TPU agent suite (now in preview) plugs directly into coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Google Antigravity to automate TPU onboarding in minutes, diagnose bottlenecks, and autotune custom kernels using plain language. For production deployments, our new open-source XLA Serving Engine lets you train models in Python and serve them directly in a low-latency C++ runtime across TPUs, GPUs, and CPUs.
  • Industry-leading production performance on InferenceX and AgentX benchmarks:
    In production, what really matters is outcomes on real AI workloads rather than theoretical peak chip speeds. On industry-standard InferenceX and AgentX benchmarks, which test realistic agentic coding and long-context work, our native vLLM-TorchTPU software stack on TPUs achieved state-of-the-art price-performance marks. New evaluations demonstrate these advantages extend across a wide range of frontier open models and open-source serving stacks while maintaining high model accuracy. Upcoming software optimizations on this same hardware will drive those results even further.
  • Eliminating idle compute waste for autonomous agents: Because AI agents are stateful, they frequently pause for seconds or hours while waiting on a database lookup, an external software tool, or human feedback. To make our agents more resource-efficient during those pauses, our new Agent Compute Engine software automatically suspends and resumes idle sessions, cutting operational infrastructure costs.
  • Breaking through the memory wall with the model-state layer (TPU Sync): Building the computer around the chip also means unifying memory, storage, and networking in software. As agents reason across million-token contexts and continuous reinforcement learning (RL) loops, memory quickly becomes the bottleneck. We’re open-sourcing TPU Sync, the model-state layer for TPU clusters. TPU Sync turns chip HBM, host DRAM, shared storage, and the data center network into a single, co-designed memory hierarchy — automatically tiering massive KV caches off the chip in milliseconds, streaming context across disaggregated prefill and decode nodes, and synchronizing RL weights to cut KV transfer latency and Time to First Token (TTFT) by more than 90%.
  • Scaling distributed workloads across TPUs from a single controller: Now generally available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Pathways brings the Google DeepMind runtime behind Gemini to every Google Cloud customer. Using a single-controller architecture and pathwaysutils, you can orchestrate large-scale TPU systems across multiple slices as if they were one local machine for pre-training, reinforcement learning, and multihost inference. Cloud Pathways keeps long-running jobs moving through hardware disruptions with colocated Python sidecars, sub-minute slice hot-swapping, and elastic resharding.
  • Stitching custom TPU topologies on-demand with GKE dynamic slicing: Now generally available, GKE dynamic slicing decouples physical hardware provisioning from logical slice formation using optical circuit switching (OCS) technology. By dynamically assembling TPU cubes into larger topologies (super-slicing) or partitioning them into smaller, isolated workloads (sub-slicing) on-the-fly, this update completely eliminates rigid, manual nodepool recreation cycles. This topology agility slashes job startup times by up to 5x and accelerates fault recovery by up to 4.5x, maximizing overall fleet utilization and workload goodput across all TPUs.

Co-designing with a decade of experience

Shipping four TPU systems and a unified, open software stack in a single year only happens when silicon architects, networking engineers, compiler teams, and Google DeepMind researchers build side-by-side.

Increasingly, we’re even tapping into AI to ideate and build the next generation of AI infrastructure. From using Google DeepMind’s AlphaChip reinforcement learning system to using Gemini to deliver chip layouts in hours rather than weeks, we’re using TPU-powered AI services to rapidly accelerate next-generation TPU hardware development. This is true co-design and a unique Google differentiator.

Learn more about our new TPU systems by tuning into today’s broadcast at 9 a.m. PT.

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