Google’s fourth-generation artificial-intelligence processor may have received design and manufacturing help from Broadcom, which is predicted to grow a part of its chips business to $750 million this year.
Much like the prior three generations, the latest iteration of Google’s custom tensor processing unit, or TPU, was co-designed by Broadcom (ticker: AVGO), the first seven-nanometer processor the semiconductor maker has produced, J.P. Morgan analyst Harlan Sur wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. Broadcom has already begun production of the fourth-generation TPU and has also begun design work with Alphabet -owned (GOOGL) Google on the fifth-generation processor, which will use a smaller five-nanometer transistor design.
Broadcom’s application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, business is currently generating $750 million in full-year revenue, up from $50 million in 2016, Hur wrote. Google introduced the TPU chips in 2016 and uses them in both data-center computing and to make its TPU-powered AI platform available to customers via its cloud-services business.
Beyond the chip design, Broadcom provided critical intellectual property and is fabricating, testing, and packaging the new chips to supply Google’s new data centers, according to Hur. Broadcom is working with other customers such as Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT), and AT&T (T), among others, to design other ASIC chips.
Google originally began using the chips to power its sprawling machine-learning efforts, and the fourth generation is roughly three times the speed of the TPU3.
“To put that in perspective, consider that in 2015, it took more than three weeks to train one of these models on the most advanced hardware accelerator available,” Google AI’s Naveen Kumar wrote in a blog post. “Google’s latest TPU supercomputer can train the same model almost five orders of magnitude faster just five years later.”
Broadcom and Google didn’t return requests for comment.
Broadcom advanced 3% to $334.64 in Wednesday trading, as the PHLX Semiconductor index gained 3.4%. J.P. Morgan’s Hur rates the stock the equivalent of a Buy and has a $365 target price.
Write to Max A. Cherney at max.cherney@barrons.com
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August 13, 2020 at 04:17AM
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How Broadcom May Have Helped Make Google’s Latest AI Chip - Barron's
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