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TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

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Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#41

Post by m4r1k »

Google's real moat isn't the TPU silicon itself—it's not about cooling, individual performance, or hyper-specialization—but rather the massive parallel scale enabled by their OCS interconnects.

To quote The Next Platform: "An Ironwood cluster linked with Google’s absolutely unique optical circuit switch interconnect can bring to bear 9,216 Ironwood TPUs with a combined 1.77 PB of HBM memory... This makes a rackscale Nvidia system based on 144 “Blackwell” GPU chiplets with an aggregate of 20.7 TB of HBM memory look like a joke."

Nvidia may have the superior architecture at the single-chip level, but for large-scale distributed training (and inference) they currently have nothing that rivals Google's optical switching scalability.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#43

Post by lvl155 »

mrbungie wrote: post #37
dana321 wrote: post #11

That and the fact they can self-fund the whole AI venture and don't require outside investment.

The most fun fact about all the developments post-ChatGPT is that people apparently forgot that Google was doing actual AI before AI meant (only) ML and GenAI/LLMs, and they were top players at it. Arguably main OpenAI raison d'être was to be a counterweight to that pre-2023 Google AI dominance. But I'd also argue that OpenAI lost its way.

And they forgot to pay those people so most of them left.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#44

Post by CuriouslyC »

qwertox wrote: post #17

How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?

The US would destroy TSMC before letting China have it. China also views military conquest of Taiwan as less than ideal for a number of reasons, so I think right now it's seen as a potential defensive move in the face of American aggression.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#45

Post by bjourne »

fooker wrote: post #10
sbarre wrote: post #2

A question I don't see addressed in all these articles: what prevents Nvidia from doing the same thing and iterating on their more general-purpose GPU towards a more focused TPU-like chip as well, if that turns out to be what the market really wants.

That's exactly what Nvidia is doing with tensor cores.

Except the native width of Tensor Cores are about 8-32 (depending on scalar type), whereas the width of TPUs is up to 256. The difference in scale is massive.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#46

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sbarre wrote: post #2

A question I don't see addressed in all these articles: what prevents Nvidia from doing the same thing and iterating on their more general-purpose GPU towards a more focused TPU-like chip as well, if that turns out to be what the market really wants.

It's not that the TPU is better than an NVidia GPU, it's just that it's cheaper since it doesn't have a fat NVidia markup applied, and is also better vertically integrated since it was designed/specified by Google for Google.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#47

Post by OccamsMirror »

lvl155 wrote: post #43
mrbungie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most fun fact about all the developments post-ChatGPT is that people apparently forgot that Google was doing actual AI before AI meant (only) ML and GenAI/LLMs, and they were top players at it. Arguably main OpenAI raison d'être was to be a counterweight to that pre-2023 Google AI dominance. But I'd also argue that OpenAI lost its way.

And they forgot to pay those people so most of them left.

To be fair, they weren't increasing Ads revenue.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#48

Post by riku_iki »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #33
riku_iki wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all small products which didn't receive traction.

It's not though. Chromecast, g suite legacy, podcast, music, url shortener,... These weren't small products.

chromecast is alive, podcast, music were migrated to youtube app, url shortener is not core business and just side hustle for google. Not familiar with g suite legacy.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#49

Post by CuriouslyC »

GordonS wrote: post #35
qwertox wrote: post #17

How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?

Highly unlikely. Despite the rampant anti-Chinese FUD that's so prevalent in the media (and, sadly, here on HN), China isn't really in the habit of invading other lands.

The plot twist here is that China doesn't view Taiwan as foreign.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#50

Post by mosura »

This is the “Microsoft will dominate the Internet” stage.

The truth is the LLM boom has opened the first major crack in Google as the front page of the web (the biggest since Facebook), in the same way the web in the long run made Windows so irrelevant Microsoft seemingly don’t care about it at all.

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