My
@Google colleagues
@NormJouppi, Sridhar Lakshmanamurthy, Cliff Young, and David Patterson recently wrote a paper that will appear in the July/August 2026 edition of
@ieeemicro titled "Google's Training Supercomputers from TPU v2 to Ironwood: Architectural Stability, Scale, Resilience, Power Efficiency, and Sustainability Across Five Generations". It's chock full of interesting data about the evolution of TPU chip generations, as well as how workloads at Google have transformed over time (hint: lots more transformer-based models!), and how the generations have gotten ~30X more energy efficient per flop.
Lots of changes over these generations:
Air cooling in TPUv2 to water cooling in TPUv3 onwards
2D to 3D torus-based interconnects
30X improvement TFLOPS/Watt
256 chips (TPUv2) to 9216 chips (Ironwood) per pod
Read the full paper: