Google claims its new TPUs are 2.7 times faster than the previous generation

Google's fourth-generation tensor processing units (TPUs), the existence of which weren't publicly revealed until today, can complete AI and machine learning training workloads in close-to-record wall clock time. That's according to the latest set of metrics released by MLPerf, the consortium of over 70 companies and academic institutions behind the MLPerf suite for AI performance benchmarking. It shows clusters of fourth-gen TPUs surpassing the capabilities of third-generation TPUs -- and even those of Nvidia's recently released A100 -- on object detection, image classification, natural language processing, machine translation, and recommendation benchmarks. Google says its fourth-generation TPU offers more than double the matrix multiplication TFLOPs of a third-generation TPU, where a single TFLOP is equivalent to 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. It also offers a "significant" boost in memory bandwidth while benefiting from unspecified advances in interconnect technology.