Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
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Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
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Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#2Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)
Using it for over a year? Wow
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#3This 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.
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#4I guess this explains why Google Cloud Compute hasn't offered GPU instances.
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#5This 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 don't see any mention of offering these chips for sale. You can rent them it seems via cloud offerings & that's it.
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#6How is this different from - say - synthetic neurons that IBM is working on, or what nvidia is building?
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#73 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 LOVE for them to market these for general use.
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#8This 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 can, too.
Where's Apple? In the corner dreaming about mythical self-driving luxury cars?
[1]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-of-...
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#9I 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
Re: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
#10This 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.
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