Highly Customized Optical Networking Critical for Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)
Google’s system leverages optical circuit switching (OCS) to create direct, low-latency optical paths between TPU chips, minimizing signal conversion losses. They avoid repeated optical-electrical-optical transformations. This enables efficient data sharing across thousands of chips in a single pod, with signals remaining in the optical domain for most inter-chip communication. Ironwood, seventh generation TPU, is purpose-built …
