Cloud TPUs in Beta
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
Cloud TPUs in Beta
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Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#2How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise?
The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#3How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise? The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...
Google claims[0] the TPU is many times faster for the workloads they've designed it for.
> On our production AI workloads that utilize neural network inference, the TPU is 15x to 30x faster than contemporary GPUs and CPUs.
As far as I know this will be the first opportunity for the public to prove those claims, as until now they've not been available on GCP. I don't mean to sound skeptical–I'm quite confident they're not exaggerating.
[0]: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/04/quantifying-the...
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#4How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise? The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...
I would imagine that (by design) they're not directly comparable.
I suspect that we'll see more information about the ASICs over time, but it'll take time to really understand their characteristics vs a Nvidia GPU - which are at least right now a bit better understood.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#5That may be Google Cloud competitive edge for AI startups. Both in terms of development cycle and cost efficiency.
Hard to replicate by competitors: AWS and Azure.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#6That $6.50/hr rate might be the big deal here. Amazon does offer instances with a V100 GPU (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/, the P3 instances), but if you're training something like ImageNet, you'll want the biggest image (p3.16xlarge) at $24.48/hr.
Attaching a VM of similar power to a TPU on Google Compute Engine is much cheaper (https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing, n1-highmem-64, +$3.78/hr to the TPU cost for $10.28/hr total).
Per recent benchmarks for training ImageNet (https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/), training ImageNet on a p3.16xlarge cost $358, when this post claims it'll cost less than $200. (EDIT: never mind; the benchmark uses ImageNet-152, and Google compares TPU performance against ImageNet-50) Interesting.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#7How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise? The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...
It is. TPUs perform calculations on weights using low-precision floating point and integer types. This saves a ton of computation, but doesn't matter much for training models.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#8How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise? The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...
Google claims[0] the TPU is many times faster for the workloads they've designed it for. > On our production AI workloads that utilize neural network inference, the TPU is 15x to 30x faster than contemporary GPUs and CPUs. As far as I know this will be the first opportunity for the public to prove those claims, as until now they've not been available on GCP. I don't mean to sound skeptical–I'm quite confident they're…
I wonder how these would compare with Amazon's FPGA instances with a comparable core running.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#9This is exciting. There are lots of specific reasons to choose Google Cloud over AWS (and vice versa), but proprietary hardware is surely an advantage that is going to be hard to replicate / compete with. If TPUs hold up to the hype, GCloud may become the de facto for ML/AI startups.
Re: Cloud TPUs in Beta
#10[deleted]