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Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#21

Post by azinman2 »

agumonkey wrote: post #16
semisight wrote: post #3

This is huge. If they really do offer such a perf/watt advantage, they're serious trouble for NVIDIA. Google is one of only a handful of companies with the upfront cash to make a move like this. I hope we can at least see some white papers soon about the architecture--I wonder how programmable it is.

I'm surprised by the perf claims. Nvidia isn't doing kids play. The graph implied they were untouchable in terms of perf...

Ndvidia has to be general purpose. This is not and thus can be better optimized.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#22

Post by honkhonkpants »

nickysielicki wrote: post #8
semisight wrote: post #3

This is huge. If they really do offer such a perf/watt advantage, they're serious trouble for NVIDIA. Google is one of only a handful of companies with the upfront cash to make a move like this. I hope we can at least see some white papers soon about the architecture--I wonder how programmable it is.

There's no way Google lets this leave their datacenters. Chip fabrication is a race to the bottom at this point. [1] Google is doubling down on hosting as a source of future revenue, and they're doing that by building an ecosystem around Tensorflow. What I think is interesting is how weak Apple looks. Amazon has the talent and money to be able to compete with Google on this playing field. Microsoft is late, but they…

Apple designs their own CPUs. I think they'd be able to field a massively parallel FMAC chip if they thought that was a good idea.

Where Apple really looks weak is in datacenters, networking, and cloud services.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#23

Post by eva1984 »

abritishguy wrote: post #9

I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and more really useful stuff: - cloud machine learning - custom hardware - live migration of hosts without downtime - Cold storage with access in seconds - bigquery - dataflow

Meaning even deeper level of vendor lock -- now you cannot even find the chips to run your application elsewhere!

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#24

Post by [deleted] »

abritishguy wrote: post #9

I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and more really useful stuff: - cloud machine learning - custom hardware - live migration of hosts without downtime - Cold storage with access in seconds - bigquery - dataflow

[deleted]

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#25

Post by dnautics »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #11
jhartmann wrote: post #7

3 generations ahead of moore law??? I really wonder how they are accomplishing this beyond implementing the kernels in hardware. I suspect they are using specialized memory and an extremely wide architecture. Sounds they also used this for AlphaGo. I wonder how badly we were off on AlphaGo's power estimates. Seems everyone assumed they were using GPU's, sounds like they were not. At least partially. I would really LO…

But isn't 3 generations ahead just 8x? Which doesn't sound at all unreasonable for a custom hardware.

This is about right! 64-bit IEEE fp -> 16-bit IEEE-style fp[0] is a 4x bit size reduction, and multiplication is O(n^2) is silicon transistor count.

[0] If google is smart, they'd ditch +/- infinity and if they were ballsy, they'd ditch zero in their FP implementation.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#26

Post by dragonwriter »

abritishguy wrote: post #9

I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and more really useful stuff: - cloud machine learning - custom hardware - live migration of hosts without downtime - Cold storage with access in seconds - bigquery - dataflow

I think the difference you observe relates directly to the difference between what Google does outside of Cloud Platform and what Amazon does outside of AWS.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#27

Post by fiatmoney »

azinman2 wrote: post #21
agumonkey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised by the perf claims. Nvidia isn't doing kids play. The graph implied they were untouchable in terms of perf...

Ndvidia has to be general purpose. This is not and thus can be better optimized.

"General purpose" isn't that general, if you look at the actual operations they support and their threading model. It's already fairly optimized for these sorts of operations, and this amount of claimed headroom makes me suspicious.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#28

Post by merb »

abritishguy wrote: post #9

I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and more really useful stuff: - cloud machine learning - custom hardware - live migration of hosts without downtime - Cold storage with access in seconds - bigquery - dataflow

to start a REAL business you SHOULD act boring. for everything else there is google.

Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

#29

Post by asimuvPR »

Now this is really interesting. I've been asking myself why this hadn't happened before. Its been all software, software, software for the last decade or so. But now I get it. We are at a point in time where it makes sense to adjust the hardware to the software. Funny how things work. It used to be the other way around.
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