Live data from Hacker News

Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

blog.google

21–30 of 240 posts

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#21
"TPU 8t and TPU 8i deliver up to two times better performance-per-watt over the previous generation" sounds impressive especially as the previous generation is so recent (2025).

Interesting that there's separate inference and training focused hardware. Do companies using NV hardware also use different hardware for each task or is their compute more fungible?

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#22
post #12

I am curious what workloads Citadel Securities is running on these TPUs? Are you telling me they need the latest TPUs for market insights?

Training their own, closed, internal models on their own data sets? Probably a good way to squeeze out some market trading signals.

Reminds me of when hedge funds started laying increasingly shorter fiber-optic cable lines to achieve the lowest possible latency for high-frequency trading.

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#23
post #21

"TPU 8t and TPU 8i deliver up to two times better performance-per-watt over the previous generation" sounds impressive especially as the previous generation is so recent (2025). Interesting that there's separate inference and training focused hardware. Do companies using NV hardware also use different hardware for each task or is their compute more fungible?

Vera Rubin will have Groq chips focused on fast inference so it points toward a trend. Also, with energy needs so high, why not reach for every feasible optimization?

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#24
post #21

"TPU 8t and TPU 8i deliver up to two times better performance-per-watt over the previous generation" sounds impressive especially as the previous generation is so recent (2025). Interesting that there's separate inference and training focused hardware. Do companies using NV hardware also use different hardware for each task or is their compute more fungible?

Nvidia said in March that they're working on specialized inference hardware, but they don't have any right now. You can do inference from Nvidia's current hardware offerings, but it's not as efficient.

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#25
post #4

As others have been capturing news cycle eyes, seems to me Google has been going from strength to strength quietly in the background capturing consumer market share and without much (any?) infrastructure problems considering they're so vertically integrated in AI since day one? At one point they even seemed like a lost cause, but they're like a tide.. just growing all around.

Yeah I think there will be a time in a few years (1-2?) when both Google and Apple will get to eat their cake. They aren't playing the same game of speed running unpolished product releases every month to double their valuation. They have time to think and observe and put out something really polished. At least that's the hope! :)

That's because these mega monopolies have diverse income streams and have grown like cancers to tax every system and economy that touches the internet.

Anthropic and OpenAI are having to fight like hell to secure market share. Google just gets to sit back and relax with its browser and android monopolies.

Why did our regulators fall asleep at the wheel? Google owns 92% of "URL bar" surface area and turned it into a Google search trademark dragnet. Now Anthropic has to bid for its own products against its competitors and inject a 15+% CAC which is just a Google tax.

Now consider all the bullshit Google gets to do with android and owning that with an iron fist. Every piece of software has a 30% tax, has to jump through hoops, and even finding it is subject to the same bidding process.

These companies need to be broken up.

Google would be healthier for the economy and its own investors as six different companies. And they shouldn't be allowed to set the rules for mobile apps or tax other people's IP and trademarks.

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#26
post #12

I am curious what workloads Citadel Securities is running on these TPUs? Are you telling me they need the latest TPUs for market insights?

Training their own, closed, internal models on their own data sets? Probably a good way to squeeze out some market trading signals.

I thought these TPUs were primarily used for inference?

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#28
post #11

At this point, when you are doing big AI you basically have to buy it from NVidia or rent it from Google. And Google can design their chips and engine and systems in a whole-datacenter context, centralizing some aspects that are impossible for chip vendors to centralize, so I suspect that when things get really big, Google's systems will always be more cost-efficient. (disclosure: I am long GOOG, for this and a few o…

I'd bet that too if their management wasn't so incredibly uninspiring. Like, Apple under Cook was also pretty mild and a huge step down from Jobs, but Google feels like it fell off a cliff. If it wasn't for OpenAI releasing ChatGPT, they might still be sitting on that tech while only testing it internally. Now it drives their entire chip R&D.

To be fair, I don't think any of the AI players wanted what OAI did. Sam grabbed first mover at the cost of this insane race everyone else got forced into.

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#29
post #16

The pics of the cooling system is pretty good sci-fi / cyberpunk / steampunk inspo. If the whole AI bubble spectularly collapes, at least we got a lot of cool pics of custom hardware!

> If the whole AI bubble spectularly collapes Every other news for the past month has been about lacking capacity. Everyone is having scaling issues with more demand than they can cover. Anthropic has been struggling for a few months, especially visible when EU tz is still up and US east coast comes online. Everything grinds to a halt. MS has been pausing new subscriptions for gh Copilot, also because a lack of capac…

Both are possible; increasing demand and bubble collapse.

The way this could happen is if model commoditization increases - e.g. some AI labs keep publishing large open models that increasingly close the gap to the closed frontier models.

Also, if consumer hardware keep getting better and models get so good that most people can get most of their usage satisfied by smaller models running on their laptop, they won't pay a ton for large frontier models.

Re: Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

#30
post #16

The pics of the cooling system is pretty good sci-fi / cyberpunk / steampunk inspo. If the whole AI bubble spectularly collapes, at least we got a lot of cool pics of custom hardware!

> If the whole AI bubble spectularly collapes Every other news for the past month has been about lacking capacity. Everyone is having scaling issues with more demand than they can cover. Anthropic has been struggling for a few months, especially visible when EU tz is still up and US east coast comes online. Everything grinds to a halt. MS has been pausing new subscriptions for gh Copilot, also because a lack of capac…

[dead]
Post reply on HN