[bgalbraith]

IBM's TrueNorth chip is taking a much more neuromorphic design approach by trying to approximate networks of biological neurons. They are investigating a new form of computer architecture away from the classic Von Neumann model.

TPUs are custom ASICs that speed up math on tensors i.e. high-dimensional matrices. Tensors feature prominently in artificial neural networks, especially the deep learning architectures. While GPUs help accelerate these operations, they are optimized first and foremost for video rendering/gaming applications -- compute-specific features are mostly tacked on. TPUs are optimized solely for doing ML-related computations.