A guide to Cloud TPU generations, what changed between them, and how to choose the right one for your workload Image source: Google Cloud If you've looked at Google Cloud TPU pricing or documentation recently, you've probably noticed there are a lot of versions to choose from. TPU v5e, v5p, v6e, Ironwood, now TPU 8t and 8i. Each one has different specs, different use cases, and different tradeoffs. This post walks through every major TPU generation, what changed at each step, and what those changes mean for the people running workloads on them. The building blocks: what's inside a TPU chip Before going generation by generation, it helps to know what the key components are, because the names come up repeatedly across every version. Image source: Google Cloud Matrix Multiply Unit (MXU). This is the core compute engine inside every TPU TensorCore. It performs the multiply-and-accumulate operations that power neural network math.…