Google turned to AMD Epyc, not its own Axion chips, to secure its first confidential TPU
Google builds its first confidential TPU on AMD Epyc rather than its own Axion chip.
Google has opted for AMD's Epyc processors in its first confidential Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), eschewing its own Axion chips. This decision is likely due to the fact that Google's audited confidential stack is x86-only at present. The confidential TPU complements Google's growing line of chips, as both Google and Nvidia provide confidential GPUs to cloud customers.
The TPU 8tx, showcased alongside the TPU 8i Max in a Google Cloud blog post, integrates Google's accelerator silicon with 5th Gen AMD Epyc CPUs. The Epyc CPUs also form the foundation for Google's first cloud TPU system with hardware-enforced confidential computing. The system combines Google's accelerator silicon with 5th Gen AMD Epyc CPUs and offers up to 2x lower latency compared to the TPU 8t, while ensuring sensitive data and model weights remain encrypted and isolated in host memory and during transmission.
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