[shaklee3]

It's not clear to me how programmable the tpu is. I'm sure it's great at convolutions and matrix multiplies. Can it do anything else?

[jlebar]

Without speaking to the capabilities of TPUs, note that most ML models today are mostly convolutions and matrix multiplies.

[EvgeniyZh]

Neither do tensor cores

[shaklee3]

The tensor core is one part of the GPU. It has plenty of other capabilities.

[PeterisP]

What else should it be doing?

It's an accelerator to run Tensorflow graphs, and TF graphs essentially are converted to matrix operations and convolutions.