Google unveils 8th-gen TPU at Hot Chips: two chips per year, split inference and training designs
firstadopter · x · 2026-09-03
- Google presented its 8th-generation TPU at Hot Chips 2026, with TPU tech lead Norman Jouppi and chip architecture senior director Sridhar Lakshmanamurthy presenting.
- Cumulative TPU generations have delivered roughly a million-fold performance increase since the first PCIe inference card.
- Key shift: from one chip per year to two — inference-optimized and training-optimized designs diverge to cover 100k+ chip pre-training runs down to a few-chip inference, distillation, MoE, and agentic models.
- MoE and agentic models demand far more interconnect bandwidth — FLOPs scale easily, interconnects don't — so this generation focused heavily on interconnect scaling.
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