TPU v5p

This document describes the architecture and supported configurations of Cloud TPU v5p.

System architecture

This section describes the system architecture specific to the v5p version. Each TensorCore has four Matrix Multiply Units (MXU), a vector unit, and a scalar unit.

There are 8960 chips in a v5p Pod. The largest job that can be scheduled is a 96 cube (6144 chip) job.

The following table shows the key specifications for TPU v5p.

Key specifications	v5p values
Peak compute per chip (BF16)	459 TFLOPs
HBM2e capacity and bandwidth	95 GB, 2765 GBps
TPU Pod size	8960 chips
Interconnect topology	3D torus *
Inter-chip interconnect (ICI) bandwidth	4800 Gbps

Important: All 4x4x4 and larger slices (one cube) have full 3D torus connectivity. Slices smaller than a full cube are 3D connected, however, they don't have wrap-around links that make them a 3D torus.

Configurations

A TPU v5p Pod is composed of 8960 chips interconnected with reconfigurable high-speed links. TPU v5p's flexible networking lets you connect the chips in a same-sized slice in multiple ways.

The following table shows the most common single-slice shapes supported with v5p, plus most (but not all) full cube shapes greater than 1 cube. The maximum v5p shape is 16x16x24 (6144 chips, 96 cubes).

Note: All v5p TPU VMs use the ct5p-hightpu-4t machine type.

Topology	Cores	Chips	Hosts	Cubes	Supports twisted?
2x2x1	8	4	1	N/A	N/A
2x2x2	16	8	2	N/A	N/A
2x4x4	64	32	8	N/A	N/A
4x4x4	128	64	16	1	N/A
4x4x8	256	128	32	2	Yes
4x8x8	512	256	64	4	Yes
8x8x8	1024	512	128	8	N/A
8x8x16	2048	1024	256	16	Yes
8x16x16	4096	2048	512	32	Yes
16x16x16	8192	4096	1024	64	N/A
16x16x24	12288	6144	1536	96	N/A

Single slice training is supported for up to 6144 chips. You can scale up to 18432 chips using Multislice. For more information about Multislice, see Cloud TPU Multislice Overview.

Cloud TPU ICI resiliency

ICI resiliency helps improve fault tolerance of optical links and optical circuit switches (OCS) that connect TPUs between cubes. (ICI connections within a cube use copper links that are not impacted). ICI resiliency allows ICI connections to be routed around OCS and optical ICI faults. As a result, it improves the scheduling availability of TPU slices, with the trade-off of temporary degradation in ICI performance.

Similar to Cloud TPU v4, ICI resiliency is enabled by default for v5p slices that are one cube or larger (4x4x4 topology).

VM, host and slice properties

Property	Value in a TPU
# of v5p chips	4
# of vCPUs	208 (only half is usable if using NUMA binding to avoid cross-NUMA performance penalty)
RAM (GB)	448 (only half is usable if using NUMA binding to avoid cross-NUMA performance penalty)
# of NUMA nodes	2
NIC throughput (Gbps)	200

Relationship between the number of TensorCores, chips, hosts/VMs, and cubes in a Pod:

	Cores	Chips	Hosts/VMs	Cubes
Host	8	4	1
Cube (rack)	128	64	16	1
Largest supported slice	12288	6144	1536	96
v5p full Pod	17920	8960	2240	140