Graphcore IPU
IPU accelerators now inside SoftBank.
Full Graphcore IPU record →Head to head
Graphcore IPU vs Google TPU Ironwood
Graphcore IPU (SoftBank) and Google TPU Ironwood (Google) both sit in Chips & Compute. Graphcore IPU is the cheaper entry point at System sales. Google TPU Ironwood shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (12 vs 0). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | Graphcore IPU SoftBank | Google TPU Ironwood |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Chips & Compute | Chips & Compute |
| Version | Bow IPU | Ironwood (7th generation) |
| Entry cost | System sales | from $5.4/unit |
| Pricing tiers | — | On-Demand (us-central1 Iowa) $12 · DWS Flex-start price (us-central1 Iowa) $6 · DWS Calendar Mode price (us-central1 Iowa) $8.4 · 1-year Commitment (us-central1 Iowa) $8.4 · 3-year Commitment (us-central1 Iowa) $5.4 · On-Demand (europe-west2 London) $13.2 · DWS Flex-start price (europe-west2 London) $6 · DWS Calendar Mode price (europe-west2 London) $8.4 |
| Model stack | n/a | Gemini · Ironwood · Ironwood (TPU v7) · Ironwood TPU · Ironwood TPU (7th Generation) · TPU v7 · TPU7x · TPU7x (Ironwood) · XLA compiler |
| Context window | — | — |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 0 | 12 |
| Origin | EU | Global |
| Capabilities | Wafer-on-wafer, Poplar SDK, Sparse compute | 9,216-chip pods, inference optimised, liquid cooled, JAX + PyTorch/XLA, Large-scale training, Reasoning and inference, 9,216 liquid-cooled chips per pod, 42.5 ExaFlops performance |
Google TPU Ironwood
v7 TPU pods scaling to 9,216 chips, available through Google Cloud and used for Gemini.
Full Google TPU Ironwood record →