Connect with us

Tech

Apple skips Nvidia’s GPUs for its AI models, uses thousands of Google TPUs instead

Published

on

Apple skips Nvidia’s GPUs for its AI models, uses thousands of Google TPUs instead

Apple has revealed that it didn’t use Nvidia’s hardware accelerators to develop its recently revealed Apple Intelligence features. According to an official Apple research paper (PDF), it instead relied on Google TPUs to crunch the training data behind the Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models.

Systems packing Google TPUv4 and TPUv5 chips were instrumental to the creation of the Apple Foundation Models (AFMs). These models, AFM-server and AFM-on-device models, were designed to power online and offline Apple Intelligence features which were heralded back at WWDC 2024 in June.

(Image credit: Apple research paper)

AFM-server is Apple’s biggest LLM, and thus it remains online only. According to the recently released research paper, Apple’s AFM-server was trained on 8,192 TPUv4 chips “provisioned as 8 × 1,024 chip slices, where slices are connected together by the data-center network (DCN).” Pre-training was a triple-stage process, starting with 6.3T tokens, continuing with 1T tokens, and then context-lengthening using 100B tokens.

Continue Reading