You said: "notice that it’s not compared to competitors"
The article says: "When scaled to 9,216 chips per pod for a total of 42.5 Exaflops, Ironwood supports more than 24x the compute power of the world’s largest supercomputer – El Capitan – which offers just 1.7 Exaflops per pod."
I believe my original sentence was accurate. I was expecting the article to provide an objective comparison between TPUs and their main competitors. If you’re suggesting that El Capitan is the primary competitor, I’m not sure I agree, but I appreciate the perspective. Perhaps I was looking for other competitors, which is why I didn’t really pay attention to El Capitan.
The article says: "When scaled to 9,216 chips per pod for a total of 42.5 Exaflops, Ironwood supports more than 24x the compute power of the world’s largest supercomputer – El Capitan – which offers just 1.7 Exaflops per pod."
It is literally compared to a competitor.