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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

#91

> It is also important to note that, until recently, the GenAI industry’s focus has largely been on training workloads. In training workloads, CUDA is very important, but when it comes to inference, even reasoning inference, CUDA is not that important, so the chances of expanding the TPU footprint in inference are much higher than those in training (although TPUs do really well in training as well – Gemini 3 the prim…

When training a neural network, you usually play around with the architecture and need as much flexibility as possible. You need to support a large set of operations.

Another factor is that training is always done with batches. Inference batching depends on the number of concurrent users. This means training tends to be compute bound where supporting the latest data types is critical, whereas inference speeds are often bottlenecked by memory which does not lend itself to product differentiation. If you put the same memory into your chip as your competitor, the difference is going to be way smaller.

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

#92

Google has always had great tech - their problem is the product or the perseverance, conviction, and taste needed to make things people want.

Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now. I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.

It's also paradoxically the talent in tech that isolates them. The internal tech stack is so incredibly specialized, most Google products have to either be built for internal users or external users.

Agree there are lots of other contributing causes like culture, incentives, security, etc.

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

#93
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to call these things DSPs

What is the difference between a DSP and Asic? Is a GPU a DSP?

A DSP contains analog to digital and digital to analog converters plus DMA for fast transfers to main memory and fixed function blocks for finite impulse response and infinite pulse response filters.

The fact that they also support vector operations or matrix multiplication is kind of irrelevant and not a defining characteristic of DSPs. If you want to go that far, then everything is a DSP, because all signals are analog.

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

#94
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 fabs would be destroyed in such a situation. The wesr would absolutely play that card in negotiations.

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

#95
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?

China will invade Taiwan when they start losing, not when they're increasingly winning. As long as "tomorrow" is a better day to invade Taiwan than today is, China will wait for tomorrow.

Their demographics beg to differ.

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

#96
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to call these things DSPs

What is the difference between a DSP and Asic? Is a GPU a DSP?

DSP is simply a compute architecture that focuses on mutliply and accumulate operations on particular numerical formats, often either fixed point q15/q31 type values or floats f16/f32.

The basic operation that a NN needs accelerating is... go figure multiply and accumulate with the added activation function.

See for example how the Intel NPU is structured here: https://intel.github.io/intel-npu-acceleration-library/npu.h...

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference between a DSP and Asic? Is a GPU a DSP?

A DSP contains analog to digital and digital to analog converters plus DMA for fast transfers to main memory and fixed function blocks for finite impulse response and infinite pulse response filters. The fact that they also support vector operations or matrix multiplication is kind of irrelevant and not a defining characteristic of DSPs. If you want to go that far, then everything is a DSP, because all signals are an…

See here https://intel.github.io/intel-npu-acceleration-library/npu.h...

Maybe also note that Qualcomm has renamed their Hexagon DSP to Hexagon NN. Likely the change was adding activation functions but otherwise its a VLIW architecture with accelerated MAC operations, aka a DSP architecture.

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

#98
post #28
post #11

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

That and they were harvesting data way before it was cool, and now that it is cool, they're in a privileged position since almost no-one can afford to block GoogleBot. They do voluntarily offer a way to signal that the data GoogleBot sees is not to be used for training, for now, and assuming you take them at their word, but AFAIK there is no way to stop them doing RAG on your content without destroying your SEO in th…

Do people still get organic search traffic from google?

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

#99
post #4

Right because people would love to get locked into another even more expensive platform.

That's mentioned in the article, but is the lock-in really that big? In some cases, it's as easy as changing the backend of your high-level ML library.

That is like how every ORM promises you can just swap out the storage layer.

In practice it doesnt quite work out that way.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google+ was big how you define big? My understanding they failed to compete with facebook, and decided to redirect resources somewhere else.

Google completely fumbled Google+ by doing a slow invite only launch. The hype when it was first coming to market was intense. But then nobody could get access because they heavily restricted sign ups. By the time it was in "open beta" (IIRC like 6-7 mos later), the hype had long died and nobody cared about it anymore.

In my recollection, what killed g+ was forcing your YouTube account to become your g+ account, with your public name attached to the trashpit YouTube comments used to be. Everybody protested using g+, but the "Google account for everything" stuck around anyways.
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