SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) - Alphabet's

on Wednesday unveiled its seventh-generation artificial

intelligence chip named Ironwood, which the company said is

designed to speed the performance of AI applications.

The Ironwood processor is geared toward the type of data

crunching needed when users query software such as OpenAI's

ChatGPT. Known in the tech industry as "inference" computing,

the chips perform rapid calculations to render answers in a

chatbot or generate other types of responses.

The search giant's multi-billion dollar, roughly decade-long

effort represents one of the few viable alternative chips to

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) powerful AI processors.

Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) can only be used by

the company's own engineers or through its cloud service and

have given its internal AI effort an edge over some rivals.

For at least one generation Google split its TPU family of

chips into a version that's tuned for building large AI models

from scratch. Its engineers have made a second line of chips

that strips out some of the model building features in favor of

a chip that shaves costs of running AI applications.

The Ironwood chip is a model designed for running AI

applications, or inference, and is designed to work in groups of

as many as 9,216 chips, said Amind Vahdat, a Google vice

president.

The new chip, unveiled at a cloud conference, brings

functions from earlier split designs together and increases the

available memory, which makes it better suited for serving AI

applications.

"It's just that the relative importance of inference is

going up significantly," Vahdat said.

The Ironwood chips boast double the performance for the

amount of energy needed compared with Google's Trillium chip it

announced last year, Vahdat said. The company builds and deploys

its Gemini AI models with its own chips.

The company did not disclose which chip manufacturer is

producing the Google design.